Dictionary of Literary Biography on A(lec) D(erwent) Hope
Dictionary of Literary Biography on A(lec) D(erwent) Hope
The legacy of leading Australian poet A. D. Hope to world literature is unquestionable, comprising eleven books of poetry, seven collections of critical essays, and two plays. His writing, compelling in its originality and passion, and rigorous in its satirical edge and philosophical insights, embodies in its language both the greatness and the frailty of the human spirit. Despite the many critical works Hope wrote during his lifetime, he will be remembered best and longest as a poet.
Alec Derwent Hope was born in Cooma, New South Wales, on 21 July 1907, the first of four children of Percival (a clergyman) and Florence Ellen (Scotford) Hope. Most of his childhood was spent in rural New South Wales and in Campbell Town, Tasmania, where he was educated at home by his parents. His father began to teach him Latin (Julius Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic Wars [52-51 B.C.] and passages from Livy) at the age of ten. Hope's love of Latin was cemented in his final year of high school when he studied the Latin verse of Catullus; this interest in Latin continued throughout his life. In his eighty-seventh year, in personal correspondence with Ann McCulloch, he wrote, "I am always glad that I awakened to Latin before I encountered the Romance languages and was able to 'hear' the original Latin behind them."
Hope first attended Bathurst High School, where his first poems appeared in the school literary journal, The Burr, in 1922-1923; it included five offerings of the then fifteen-year-old Hope--three poems and two translations of poems by Catullus. He then moved to Fort Street Boys' High School, Sydney, for his matriculation year. In 1924 Hope was awarded a scholarship to study arts at Sydney University; he accepted the scholarship after dealing with his disappointment at failing to be accepted for medicine, his first choice. Hope graduated from Sydney University in 1928 with first-class honors in English and
The legacy of leading Australian poet A. D. Hope to world literature is unquestionable, comprising eleven books of poetry, seven collections of critical essays, and two plays. His writing, compelling in its originality and passion, and rigorous in its satirical edge and philosophical insights, embodies in its language both the greatness and the frailty of the human spirit. Despite the many critical works Hope wrote during his lifetime, he will be remembered best and longest as a poet.
Alec Derwent Hope was born in Cooma, New South Wales, on 21 July 1907, the first of four children of Percival (a clergyman) and Florence Ellen (Scotford) Hope. Most of his childhood was spent in rural New South Wales and in Campbell Town, Tasmania, where he was educated at home by his parents. His father began to teach him Latin (Julius Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic Wars [52-51 B.C.] and passages from Livy) at the age of ten. Hope's love of Latin was cemented in his final year of high school when he studied the Latin verse of Catullus; this interest in Latin continued throughout his life. In his eighty-seventh year, in personal correspondence with Ann McCulloch, he wrote, "I am always glad that I awakened to Latin before I encountered the Romance languages and was able to 'hear' the original Latin behind them."
Hope first attended Bathurst High School, where his first poems appeared in the school literary journal, The Burr, in 1922-1923; it included five offerings of the then fifteen-year-old Hope--three poems and two translations of poems by Catullus. He then moved to Fort Street Boys' High School, Sydney, for his matriculation year. In 1924 Hope was awarded a scholarship to study arts at Sydney University; he accepted the scholarship after dealing with his disappointment at failing to be accepted for medicine, his first choice. Hope graduated from Sydney University in 1928 with first-class honors in English and