A. D. Hope

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Alec Derwent Hope (July 21, 1907 - July 13, 2000) was an Australian poet and essayist known for his satirical slant. He was also a critic, teacher and academic.

Hope was born in Cooma, New South Wales, and educated partly at home and in Tasmania. He attended Sydney University, and then the University of Oxford on a scholarship. Returning to Australia in 1931 he then trained as a teacher, and spent some time drifting. He worked as a psychologist with the New South Wales Department of Labour and Industry, and as a lecturer in Education and English at Sydney Teachers College (1937-44).

He was a lecturer at the University of Melbourne from 1945 to 1950, and in 1951 took the post as the first professor of English at the newly-founded Canberra University College, later of the Australian National University when the two institutions merged, a chair he held until retiring in 1967.

Although he was published as a poet while still young, The Wandering Islands (1955) was his first collection, what remained of his early work after it was mostly destroyed in manuscript in a fire. Its publication was also delayed by concern about the effects of Hope's highly-erotic and savagely-satirical verse on the Australian public. His influences were Pope and the Augustan poets, Auden, and Yeats; he was a polymath, very largely self-taught, and with a talent to offend his countrymen.

He was awarded an OBE in 1972, and many other honours. He died in Canberra.