BOOKS
TWO POETS
COLLECTED POEMS OF A. D. HOPE. The Viking Press, Inc. $6.00.
NEAR THE OCEAN.
By
Robert Low.eli. Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux, Inc.
$5.50
At first glance there is no special interest attached to the
fact that A. D. Hope is an Australian poet; his subjects and attitudes
seem firmly European. His poise and sophistication remind one often of
Auden, with whom he is in fact contemporary. (Hope's collection covers
the period 1930-1965.) Still there are deliberate distancing notes sounded
- as in a poem called "Australia" - which give this book its special cast:
"They call her a young country, but they lie: / She is the last of lands,
the emptiest / ... Yet there are some like me turn gladly home /From
the lush jungle of modern thought, to find / The Arabian desert of the
human mind." Those "turns gladly home" do not, in fact, dominate
this collection, but they provide a retreat, "the Arabian desert of the
human mind," from which European literary modes can be reviewed
with a freshness one would have thought almost impossible in a post–
W.aste-Land world.
We are led through a very familiar gallery of mytho–
logical, historical and Biblical subjects, and we are asked to see the flash
of energy behind the traditional pose. It is no surprise to find Hope
drawn by Rome, the greatest gallery of them all, in a jocular Byronic
poem on the uses and abuses of history. Nor is it a surprise, in his "Letter
from Rome," to find
him
mocking an American girl who, during her fin–
ishing school year in Italy, keeps crisp notebooks on the history of art and
her obligatory Italian love affair. But, that tale gaily and sharply told, his
narrator shifts gears: the true pilgrim, not stopping with the mere city of
Rome, goes on, instead, to the Lake of Nemi, where he will recover his
sense of the mysterious, forceful prehistoric gods. At times too simple, too
close to versified Frazer, the closing section of the poem remains a clue
to Hope'S more intense, more successful mythological poems, which are
meant to "re-create the fables and revive / In men the energies by which
they live."
