My understanding is that AD Hope actually loved women.
cheers
Steve KK
At 8:22 AM +1100 03/12/2000, [log in to unmask] wrote:
>Douglas wrote (of Hope):
>
>>Maybe it's his strong anti-modernism
>>I tend to dislike, even as I admrie his Swiftian humour, he is after all
>>Oz'a 'greatest 18th century poet'...
>
>Yes, he's very peculiar in that way (perhaps very Australian?). I think
>Kevin Hart wrote that he was more properly an heir of Rilke and the
>Romantics, in a Silver dress, which seems pretty accurate to me - perhaps
>someone who's read the book can comment...
>
>However, that poem I quoted is pretty amazing for a misogynist to write
>in 1965, yes? Especially with its awareness of the significance of
>things like domestic violence and its attack on the authority of the
>husband, and for its passionate denunciation of female oppression. I
>mean, especially when you look at the gender politics of more
>"progressive" poets like Olson, who I find much more troublingly
>misogynist. Hope was good friends with Gwen Harwood and had no problem
>with the idea that women could write poems, which despite the staggering
>contributions of women to modernism seems sometimes a bit of a block with
>the so-called avant garde.
>
>Not that gender's any way to read poetry, just interesting.
>
>Cheers
>
>Alison
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