Everything about A D Hope totally explained
Alec Derwent Hope (
July 21 1907 –
July 13 2000) was an
Australian poet and
essayist known for his
satirical slant. He was also a critic, teacher and academic.
Life
Hope was born in
Cooma, New South Wales, and educated partly at home and in
Tasmania. He attended
Fort Street Boys High School,
Sydney University, and then the
University of Oxford on a scholarship. Returning to Australia in 1931 he then trained as a teacher, and spent some time drifting. He worked as a
psychologist with the New South Wales Department of Labour and Industry, and as a lecturer in Education and English at Sydney Teachers College (1937-44).
He was a lecturer at the
University of Melbourne from
1945 to
1950, and in
1951 took the post as the first professor of English at the newly-founded
Canberra University College, later of the
Australian National University(ANU) when the two institutions merged, a chair he held until retiring in 1968. From 1968 was appointed Emeritus Professor at the ANU.
He was awarded an
OBE in
1972 and the
AC in
1981, and many other honours. He died in
Canberra, having suffered
dementia in his last years, and is buried at the
Queanbeyan Lawn Cemetery.
Poet and critic
Although he was published as a poet while still young,
The Wandering Islands (1955) was his first collection, what remained of his early work after it was mostly destroyed in manuscript in a fire. Its publication was also delayed by concern about the effects of Hope's highly-erotic and savagely-satirical verse on the Australian public. His influences were
Pope and the
Augustan poets,
Auden, and
Yeats; he was a polymath, very largely self-taught, and with a talent for offending his countrymen. He wrote a book of "answers" to other poems, including one in response to the poem “
To His Coy Mistress” by
Andrew Marvell.
The reviews he wrote in the 1940s and 50s were feared "for their acidity and intelligence. If his reviews hurt some writers -
Patrick White included - they also sharply raised the standard of literary discussion in Australia." However, Hope relaxed in later years. As poet
Kevin Hart writes, "The man I knew, from 1973 to 2000, was invariably gracious and benevolent". Cole suggests that Hope represented the three attributes that
Vladimir Nabokov believed essential in a writer, "storyteller, teacher, enchanter". (Chicago)
1972: Order of the British Empire (OBE)
1976: The Age Book of the Year Fiction Award for A Late Picking
1976: Robert Frost Award for Poetry
1981: Order of Australia (AC)
1989: New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Special Award
1993: ACT Book of the Year Award for Chance Encounters
Bibliography
The Wandering Islands (1955),
Poems (1960),
The cave and the spring (1965) essays
Collected poems (1966),
New poems (1965-1969),
Dunciad Minor (1970) satire
A midsummer eve's dream (1970)
Native companions (1974),
A late picking (1975),
The pack of Autolycus (1978) essays
The new Cratylus (1979) poetics
A book of answers (1978)
The drifting continent (1979) poems
Antechinus (1981),
The tragical history of Dr Faustus (1982),
The age of reason (1985) poems
Ladies from the sea (1987) drama
Orpheus (1991) poems
Chance encounters memoirsFurther Information
Get more info on 'A D Hope'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://a__d__hope.totallyexplained.com">A. D. Hope Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
