SOURCE: Suchting, W. A. “The Poetry of A. D. Hope: A Frame of Reference.” Meanjin Quarterly 89, no. 21 (1962): 154-63.

In the following essay, Suchting delineates the “frame of reference” in Hope's verse.

Every significant artist has a fundamental axis about which his work revolves, a basic perspective from which, in which, he sees the world and himself. (This is true even—perhaps especially—when the central attitude is composed of different, and maybe opposing elements.)

The aim of the following essay is to attempt to demarcate this ‘frame of reference’ in the poetry of A. D. Hope, as far as it has been published in The Wandering Islands (1955) and Poems (1960), and to discuss some of the implications of such a position.

I

The poem which gives its title to Hope's first collection expresses this basic perspective with simple directness: human isolation. ‘Wandering islands’ are by no means without points...