Susan Lever on A.D. Hope: Poet and Philosopher

Alec Derwent Hope was born a son of the manse, reading the Bible daily and attending regular church services conducted by his Presbyterian minister father. By the time he finished university, though, he was a declared atheist, influenced by the teaching of John Anderson at the University of Sydney.

This talk will discuss the way his changing attitudes to religious belief influenced his poetry—from his anticlerical satires and antiromantic versions of sexual desire in the 1940s to his search for a non-religious understanding of a universal harmony that embraced creativity and love in the 1950s and 1960s. Hope thought religious belief might be associated with personality—and he was at ease with uncertainty.