SOURCE: Maver, Igor. “The Baudelairean Decadent Strain in A. D. Hope's Verse.” In Readings in Contemporary Australian Poetry, pp. 27-35. Bern, Germany: Peter Lang, 1997.

In the following essay, Maver considers the links between the poetry of Hope and Charles Baudelaire.

I

The Australian poet A. D. Hope never felt the particular need to stress the degree of ‘Australianness’ inherent in his poems; rather, as exemplified by his poem “Australia,” he would refer to “the Arabian desert of the human mind” in Australia. Hope is described by the critics as an academic and largely intellectual poet, because of his usage of traditional poetic forms and numerous allusions from classical literatures and cultures, which he considers the source of Western and also Australian culture. Although he did, in fact, find frequent inspiration in the English neo-classicist literary models and satirical impulses of the eighteenth century, Romantic and even Decadent content...