The first biography of A.D. Hope, one of Australia's greatest poets.
Alec Derwent Hope (1907–2000) was one of Australia's most acclaimed poets. His first collection was not published until he was forty-eight years old, mainly because of its sexual nature and fears of censorship, but its release cemented his reputation.
This biography recounts Hope's early life in rural Tasmania, the influences of his education at Sydney and Oxford universities, his notoriety as a critic and wit in the 1940s and '50s, and his career as a poet and academic, which placed him at the centre of Australian literary life for over fifty years.
Drawing on Hope's poetry, notebooks and surviving letters to friends, Susan Lever examines the many contrasts and contradictions of Hope's life: a polite, softly spoken man with a savage wit; a professor who refused to confine himself to the narrow specialisations of the academy; an emotionally complex intellectual who lived an outwardly conventional life in ordinary Australian suburbia; a poet responding to the major cultural shifts of the twentieth century and concluding that the contemporary poet's task was the renewal of tradition.
'In this highly engaging biography, Susan Lever provides invaluable insight into one of Australia's most important cultural figures, revealing A. D. Hope to be a poet of complexity, a generous promoter of other writers and an early advocate of Australian literary studies. This finely-researched book should generate much-needed fresh readings of Hope and his work.' —Ann Vickery, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Australian Poetry
'... a book everyone interested in modern literature will want to read.' —Kevin Hart, author of Poetry and Revelation
'[A.D. Hope] offers a study that is at once patient, exacting, and, at moments, quietly provocative.'—Australian Book Review
'Unsensational and clear-eyed' —The Saturday Paper
[Lever's] clear-eyed biography is not blind to Hope's failings, but is also not unduly detained by them. Instead she provides us with the terms to understand the dignity and meaning of his life.—Inside Story