Alec Derwent Hope (1907–2000) was one of Australia's most acclaimed poets. His first collection was not published until he was forty-eight years old, mainly because of its sexual nature and fears of censorship, but its release cemented his reputation as the pre-eminent Australian poet of his time.

This biography recounts Hope's early life in rural Tasmania, the influences of his education at Sydney and Oxford universities, his notoriety as a critic and wit in the 1940s and '50s, and his career as a poet and academic, which placed him at the centre of Australian literary life for over fifty years.

Drawing on Hope's poetry, notebooks and surviving letters to friends, biographer Susan Lever examines the many contrasts and contradictions of Hope's life: a polite, softly spoken man with a savage wit; a professor who refused to confine himself to the narrow specialisations of the academy; an intellectual with an emotionally complex inner life who lived in an outwardly conventional way in ordinary Australian suburbia; a poet responding to the major cultural shifts of the twentieth century and concluding that the contemporary poet's task was the renewal of tradition.