SOURCE: Wright, Judith. “A. D. Hope.” In Preoccupations in Australian Poetry, pp. 181-92. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1965.

In the following essay, Wright offers a thematic and stylistic analysis of Hope's poetry.

As a poet, McAuley, in spite of his austerity, has sometimes seemed too gracefully nostalgic to present a firm front against the disregard and mere incomprehension that this commercial age and country accords to poetry. Its much more violent adversary has always been A. D. Hope. The two have at least this in common, that both insist on the imposition of order and metrical discipline on a poetic experience that seems to each to be chaotic. But Hope has often suffered from being as much his own adversary as that of the world; so that, instead of castigating the hypocrisy and insensitiveness of others, he seems rather to be preoccupied with enormous and half-real terrors which originate...