AustLit

'In the fifth of his "Western Elegies," written towards the end of his career, the pre-eminent Australian poet A. D. Hope notes the importance for him as a person and as a writer of his exposure to languages and cultures other than English. He was an avid learner of languages throughout his life, from Latin to Arabic and Japanese. His poetry and criticism, accordingly, engage closely with an enormous wealth of material from the European tradition and beyond, focusing particularly on ancient Greece and Rome, on the modern "tongues of Italy, France and Iberia," and the "tongues of the Goths and the Germans, the Norse and the Anglo-Saxons," in which he specialized when at Oxford. Here, Wells draws on the papers, correspondence and notebooks in Hope's archive at the National Library of Australia, as well as on his published writing on Russian themes, to explore the full range of his engagement with Russian literature and to demonstrate its centrality to his thinking in his last three decades as a poet' (author's abstract).