I'm afraid I've been offline for some time and just received 772 emails.
I'm actually surprised that the death of A.D. Hope has only generated a few posts, considering the number of responses for Judith Wright.
The poem that Alison refers to is actually "On an engraving by Casserius" and the image was from a book called Anatomy(?) by Vaselius. There is a copy in the Rare Books library at Sydney University, probably the only copy in Australia. The images are amazing. One of these, the subject of Hope's poem, is featured in the Halstead Press Select Poems edited by David Brooks.
I would suggest that anyone turned away by Hope's apparent formalism takes another look. Some of his poems are the greatest I have ever read. I was fortunate enough to spend 6 months studying both Hope and Wright at Sydney Uni in a course run by David Brooks. It is interesting to read Hope and Wright side by side, some of the connections are very interesting, and the commentary that the two have made on each others poetry/philosophy reveals not only an excellent insight to the subject but also the author. Judith Wright's analysis of Hope's dualism is probably the best example!
Regarding the apparent formalism and the concept of the professor-poet I thought I would include a quote from the intro to "The Double Looking Glass" (essays on Hope ed. by Brooks):
"It is interesting to reflect that if Frank Moorehouse, challenging the censorship of the period, was publishing in Playboy, so too at one point did A.D. Hope ("The Ballad of Dan Homer"), whom the poets of Moorehouse's generation tended to see as their conservative bete-noir."
I would strongly second Viv's comments about The Wandering Islands and add to that some personal favourites: End of a Journey, On an Engraving by Casserius, The Double Looking Glass.
And as a last comment, which I think featured in the Saturday Sydney Morning Herald... There was the story of Hope tracking down a rather decrepit and drunk Chris Brennan in a Sydney pub. Hope followed him into the bathroom and began to scrawl graffiti in Latin on the wall. Brennan couldn't resist taking the pencil and correcting the grammar.
Hope was one of the great Australian poets well worth further reading.
Best to all,
Jim
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