SOURCE: Brooks, David. “The Ring of Isopata: Orpheus and The Age of Reason.” In The Double Looking Glass: New and Classic Essays on the Poetry of A. D. Hope, edited by David Brooks, pp. 274-80. St. Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 2000.

In the following essay, which was originally published in 1992, Brooks reevaluates Hope's reputation as a poet through an examination of his collections Orpheus and The Age of Reason.

I have long suspected that A. D. Hope's notorious traditionalism and poetic formalism have been generally misunderstood, and that, truistic as it has come to seem, the critical assumption that he is ultimately and perhaps simply an artist of inherent contradictions is reductive at best. The recent appearance of Orpheus, a new collection of his poems, has done nothing to change my thinking.

Even Nietzsche, iconoclast that he was, recognised the need for a pierpost—the need to...