Since radical orthodoxies of every kind have established themselves in the Australian academic world’s main discussion – or, as the academics themselves would be more likely to say, in its “discourse” – with a solidity and inflexibility that an outsider would find it hard to credit, Dr McCulloch is actually being quite brave in backing him up. Although she finds some of Hope’s more overtly sexy poetry insensitive, she nevertheless thinks that he was always on to something in writing as if the sexual impulse might have a mind of its own, and that women, also, might occasionally be mastered by desire. Her complaint about “the fact that sexual attraction is often left out of feminist discourse” only sounds trite. In the Australian context it verges on the daring. Similarly, she is going quite a long way towards dangerous independence when she defends Hope’s reactionary opinions about modern poetry.

Strangely enough, Dr McCulloch goes further in this direction than she needs to. Hope’s reactionary views were attractive when he wanted to warn against pointless innovation and keep faith with the past. (He was dead right, for example, about the cultural impoverishment that would inevitably ensue from Australia’s adoption of metrical distance measures. By now it’s as if the Australian version of the English language had been taken over by an inspectorate from Brussels: give them 2.54 centimetres and they’ll take 1.60934 kilometres.) But he overdid it when he preached against modern poetry, by which he meant anything that wasn’t clear in meaning and sustained by an ascertainable structure. According to Hope, there was nothing in English poetry after Yeats, because Yeats, according to him, was the last to write intelligibly, and in forms you could see. This left the way open for Hope himself, who wrote in visible forms too, but it closed off his attention to whole swathes of achievement, including even Eliot, whom Hope managed to find prosaic. By this shared measure of cranky obscurantism, Hope and Robert Graves should have been soulmates. Hope admired Graves’s hieratic, muse-wooing attitude to the sacred art they shared. But Hope also found Graves insufficiently respectful of Yeats, lauded in The Wandering Islands as the only touchstone in modern times.

To have found at last that noble, candid speech
In which all things worth saying may be said . . .
It was a sad joke when Hope boycotted a visit to Australia by Graves, on the grounds that Graves, in his Oxford lectures, had been rude about Yeats: the two eccentrics might have had a fine time agreeing that Auden was overrated. As things happened, nothing happened. Hope demonstrated his feelings by not showing up. It is easier to demonstrate your feelings when you are present. With good reason, Hope was a proud man. But he was also a shy one, and shy pride is easily interpreted as arrogance.

Hope was braver in print, where he really was arrogant. Early in his career a victim of one of his book reviews committed suicide. After that, Hope softened up as a reviewer, but he was never slow to dismiss whole modern careers. There are plenty of poets who indulge in blanket condemnation. The price of ploughing a lonely furrow is often to mistake it for the only path across the field. But Hope was also a teacher – as Professor of English at the Australian National University in Canberra he was at the head of his profession – and he had no business encouraging students to do more of what they will do naturally unless told otherwise: not read. There might have been an excuse for it if his brilliant start as a formal poet had gone on to further triumph. To that question we can now turn, Hope having enjoyed fifty years of scarcely interrupted endorsement since he made his initial impact. Indeed, the advent of Dr McCulloch’s misconceived opus might well mark the point when endorsement, having decayed into hagiography, needs as much interruption as it can get.

To her, then, we can now say farewell, with a final “well done” for defending an important artist whose achievement exemplifies everything that Australian ideologists would like to bury about a superseded world of racist, imperialist, sexist culture – and in plain language, that last property somehow confirming it as the height of elitism. The farewell is made easier to say by the physical discrepancy between Hope’s elegant initial book (bound in green and gold by Edwards & Shaw, The Wandering Islands was a lovely thing to behold at a time when most Australian books smelled of glue) and a lumbering compendium that drains the spirit even when seen edge-on in the shelf. And I just heard the shelf creak. No, Dance of the Nomad will have to go. Hope, who clearly had a personal regard for the author – he wrote a poem to her, which she quotes complete – would have taken one look at it and changed his own name to Despair.

He never lived to see the day, although he came close. Hope died in 2000, at the age of ninety-three. His stature was never in question and still isn’t, but those of us with a regard for his abilities can legitimately ask ourselves why he didn’t conquer the world. Nothing could have stopped him doing so except himself. His poems were instantly intelligible wherever English was spoken. Unencumbered with specifically Australian references, they could be appreciated by anybody susceptible to his lyrical gift and rhythmic force, which meant just about everyone who read English poetry anywhere: people who couldn’t tell an iamb from a trochee could still tell that Hope’s verse did the business.

And for a while, after The Wandering Islands, he got even better. I was at Cambridge in the mid 60s when I happened to see a plush magazine from the University of Texas that carried his long verse letter to Leonie Kramer, “A Letter from Rome”. Its supple mastery of a playful tone suggested that he might have secretly paid pre-war Auden and MacNeice a lot more attention than he had ever let on. The news-reading properties of Letters from Iceland and Autumn Journal were in it, and it had a swing to the handling of the ottava rima that was not shamed by the rhyme royal of “Letter to Lord Byron”, while proving, from stanza to stanza, that Hope had an even better grasp than Auden of how light verse could develop an argument through comic narrative. The overtly satirical poems of The Wandering Islands had usually been called satirical because they weren’t really all that funny, but parts of “A Letter from Rome” were funny, especially about the hard labour of taking in too much art at once.

I’ve contemplated all the types of Venus
Which win the heart or take the soul by storm,
The modest fig-leaf and the shameless penis
In every proper or improper form,
Until the individual in the genus
Is lost and all exceptions in the norm,
And fair and foul and quaint and crass and
crude
Dissolve in one vast cliché of the Nude.

On the strength of a tone-control as flexible as that, the way was open for Hope to develop a second line of light verse chronicle that he could have played off against his more overtly serious poetry for the rest of his life, each strand gaining from its interaction with the other. There would have been no one quite like him in the world. But with an open road in front of him, he chose to make camp in a lay-by, and settle in. It could have been that there was no choice. He had to have a job, and the job he got was demanding. He made it more so by turning his professorship into the central point of a whole movement in scholarship that studied and codified the Australian literary past. The results were an unarguable gain for knowledge even if they left open the question of whether the poets at or near Hope’s level in the justly entitled Great Generation were really standing on the shoulders of their Australian predecessors or whether, as seems more likely, they had been goaded into emulation by the contemporary literature of Britain and America.

But there could be no question about the scholarly effort involved. It was taxing. Hope spent a lot of time doing what no poet should ever do: reading uninspired stuff because he had to. As a corollary, there was a lot of inspired stuff that he ignored. His reasons for ignoring it were not as good as he thought, or said he thought. It was true that most poets who wouldn’t write in regular forms couldn’t really write at all, but some of them could. In Australia, in the long run, the informal poets won out. Les Murray writes almost nothing in regular stanzas. A poet who does – Stephen Edgar is the most accomplished current example – faces the general opinion that an adopted discipline is a restriction on poetic invention, rather than a stimulus to it. Hope’s later achievement was strong enough to ward off that general opinion in his own case, but there should never have been a contest. He should have been powerful enough to settle the argument in his favour before it began. Why wasn’t he?

I can think of three reasons. The first is that his use of biblical and classical mythology was subject to the law of diminishing returns. Pasiphaë could present herself to the bull only so often before she had to yield her place to a more obscure temptress with a less fascinating sexual partner. To put it bluntly, Hope was simply bound to use up what Larkin disparagingly called “the myth kitty”. In an early poem like “The Return of Persephone”, Hope could count on his readers knowing roughly who Persephone was, or at least knowing where to look to find out: the age had not yet dawned when students would feel discriminated against if asked to pick the difference between a pard and a bard. But by the time of his book-length poem sequence of 1985, The Age of Reason, he had scraped the barrel down to the level of Ophrys and Andrenus: hand on your heart and say you wouldn’t have to look them up.

The second reason is closely related to the first. Almost certainly, Hope kept talking about mythical figures because he thought it beneath his high calling to talk about contemporary events, a category in which he included his own personal history. By and large, he left himself out of it, when his range of subject matter could have benefited mightily had he brought himself in. As “A Letter from Rome” proved, he had the chief weapon that would have allowed him to do so: humour. He could have been funny about growing old, with all his lusts intact in a body falling apart. It is, after all, a universal subject, and there is even dignity in it, if the narrator can admit his failings. But Hope chose to keep his dignity for himself.

The third reason is out on its own, and probably would have decided the matter even without the other two. His technique went haywire. Readers who start with Selected Poetry and Prose, edited by David Brooks in the year of Hope’s death, will find much to delight them, including a selection from Hope’s notebooks modestly presented with no mention of a rhizome. But there is no mistaking the fact that the poems near the end of the book lack the sure-footedness of the poems near the front. A late poem called “The Cetaceans”, an ottava rima extravaganza with an enchanting cargo of natural-science fact, should have been one of his masterpieces, but there are too many awkward lines, and some of them are jaw-breakers. The days when he could substitute lavishly within a line and still hold it together with a conversational rhythmic impulse were gone. By the standards he had long ago set for himself, he was out of control. His air of authority, always his most precious quality, dissipated as his touch became less certain.
A critic who knew a lot about art and nothing about verse technique could say that Hope had developed a “later manner”, like Titian or Michelangelo, and that he was deliberately leaving undone what he knew too well how to do. But Titian, when he left things half painted, hadn’t forgotten how to paint, and Michelangelo, when he left the slaves stuck in the rock, hadn’t forgotten how to set them free. Hope either forgot how to compose a line or else he convinced himself that it no longer mattered. Either way, it’s a mystery. Luckily the comparative clumsiness of his later work didn’t erode the reputation he had already. But it did block off the extra renown he might have earned as a magician transmuting all the experience of his advancing years into poems that became steadily more rich and varied. Nobody can know just how good A. D. Hope was who doesn’t regret that his full greatness never quite arrived. He won plenty of prestige, but you can’t recite that.