SOURCE: Pons, Xavier. “Hope and the Apocalyptic Splendour of the Sexes.” Australian Literary Studies 19, no. 4 (October 2000): 373-86.

In the following essay, Pons explores the erotic and chauvinistic dimensions of Hope's verse.

I was then your music and you mine 

(‘Vivaldi, Bird and Angel’)

Among Australian poets, few owe a greater part of their inspiration to Eros than A. D. Hope. ‘Love and desire have prompted some of his best poetry’, Candida Baker noted, ‘and some of Australia's most erotic poems’ (Baker 162). This characteristic exposed him to much censure, both from those critics, like Max Harris, who regarded him as sex-crazed, or Vincent Buckley who thought him ‘sexually obsessed, and obsessed in an unpleasant manner’ (Hart 9; Brooks 46) and those who took him to task for his male chauvinism (see Docker 52 or Ann McCulloch in Brooks 264-65, 268). Oddly enough, however, the principal literary histories of Australia tend to ignore the...