AustLit

'Removed from its historical context, this poem by the Australian poet Alec Derwent Hope (1907–2000) might have seemed little more than a rearguard grumble by a disgruntled formalist, but it appeared on the same page as a review of A New History of Australia, a collection of essays representing what Donald Horne identified as the two main approaches to Australian history – “the rough myth of universal mateship and the smooth myth of universal respectability”. Ten years later Neil Corcoran, writing about the Selected Poems of Hope and another Australian poet, Les Murray, spoke of more specifically poetic reactions to the colonial heritage, and claimed that while Hope is consistently and conventionally metrical, Murray writes in “large, open, exploratory forms and sequences”. Where, as Corcoran put it, Murray’s poetry is almost “combatively uncluttered by allusions to ‘English poetry’”, Hope’s embrace of the classico-European literary tradition enables him to transcend nationalism so successfully that, as Clive James said, his contemporaries “were obliged to acknowledge his primacy even when they weren’t glad about it”.' (Introduction)