Analysis of Woman to Man by Judith Wright I was slightly confused when I read this poem at first, but it became

apparent from the rich metaphors, that it was about the sexual relation between the woman and man. It is also about conception - or rather the potential of creating a child from this sexual act - told from the woman's point of view. Judith Wright was very bold in writing such a poem since it was published in 1949, when such issues weren't discussed in the public, but as a well-regarded poet, she had achieved a good reputation for expressing herself, and therefore could write a subjective poem about this issue. The main idea of this poem, is based upon female sexuality and sensuality, and that sex is symbolic of life, or death if pregnancy fails. The title seems to mean now, "Woman to Man" as if the woman is offering herself to the Man, offering her body to create a child, through the act of sex. It also means that the woman has something to give to the man, not only the pleasure, but through blood and pain, a child. .. An Analysis of Woman To Man The form of this text is a poem. The visual appearance of the text on the page indicates to us that it is a poem: it is positioned in the center of the page and it is made up of uniform sections, or stanzas. The form is more constrained than that of a novel, which runs freely across the page from left to right. The text also utilizes formal poetic features, such as: multiple stanzas containing equal numbers of lines; line breaks between stanzas; and a regular number of beats per line. The knowledge that Judith Wright is a well-known poet adds to the evidence that this is a poem. This text has more than one intended audience. The primary audience is Judith Wright's husband. It is a well-known fact (in literary circles) that Wright addressed this poem to her husband when she was pregnant with one of their children. The intimate nature of this exchange between Wright and her husband is evident in her use of personal pronouns: "you and I have known it well"; "your arm"; "my breast". The second intended audience is every woman and every man, a... ..Judith Wright (1915-2000) Prolific Australian poet, critic, and short-story writer, who published more than 56 volumes of poetry and short stories. Judith Wright, whose work was deeply rooted in the landscape of her native Australia, was an uncompromising environmentalist and social activist campaigning for Aboriginal land rights. She believed that the poet should be concerned with national and social problems. At the age of 85, just before her death, she attended in Canberra a march for reconciliation with Aboriginal people. Rhyme, my old cymbal, I don't clash you as often, or trust your old promises music and unison. I used to love Keats, Blake; now I try haiku for its honed brevities, its inclusive silences. (from 'Brevity' in Notes at Edge) Judith Arundell Wright was born near Armidale, New South Wales, into an old and wealthy pastoral family. Later she wrote of her family affectionally in The Generations of Men (1959). Wright was raised on her family's sheep station. After the death of her mother in 1927, she was educated under the supervision of her relatives. At the age of 14, after her father remarried, she was sent to New England Girls' Scool, where she found consolation in poetry, publishing in 1933 her first poem. In 1934 she entered Sydney University, where she studied philosophy, history, psychology and English, without taking a degree.

When Wright was in her 20s, she became progressively deaf. Between the years 1937 and 1938, she travelled in Britain and Europe. She then worked as a secretary-stenographer and clerk until 1944. From 1944 to 1948 she was a university statistician at the University of Queensland, St. Lucia. At the age of 3,0 Wright met her lifelong partner, the unorthodox philosopher J.P. McKinney, 23 years her senior; they later married. Most of Wright's poetry was written in the mountains of southern Queensland. Protesting the policy of Joh BjelkePetersen, Premier of Queensland, Wright left her home state in the mid-1970s, and settled in a remote property near the heritage town of Braidwood, south of Canberra, where she wrote many of her later nature poems. Wright's lyrical work was inspired by the various regions in which she lived: New England, New South Wales, the subtropical rainforests of Tamborine Mountain, Queensland, and the plains of the southern highlands near Braidwood. T.S. Eliot's influence can be seen in Phantom Dwelling (1985); other poets that influenced her were Wallace Stevens and W.B. Yeats. A new period in Wright's life started in the mid-1950s: "The two threads of my life, the love of the land itself and the deep unease over the fate of its original people, were beginning to twine together, and the rest of my life would be influenced by that connection." In The Two Faces (1955) she took Hiroshima as an example of man's power to destroy even the cycles of nature. Wright's activism on conservation issues led her to focus on the interaction between land and the language. According to Wright, "the true function of art and culture is to interpret us to ourselves, and to relate us to the country and the society in which we live." She started to see that her mission was to find words and poetic forms to bridge the human experience and the natural world, man and earth. "Poetry needs a background in which emotional, as well as material values are given their due weight; and the effect of this shallowness of roots is easily traceable in Australian writing, with its uneasy attempts to solve or to ignore the problem of its attitude to the country." Alienation from the land meant for Wright crisis of the language. She criticized the education system for failing to teach students the pleasures of poetry, and promoted the reading and writing of poetry in schools. Realistically, she also expressed doubts about the power of poetry to change the scheme of things. In the early 1960s, Wright helped to found Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland. She fought to conserve the Great Barrier Reef, when its ecology was threatened by oil drilling, and campaigned against sand mining on Fraser Island. In her passionate poem 'Australia 1970' Wright expressed her feelings of disappointment and anger, seeing her wild country die, "like the eaglehawk, / dangerous till the last breaths gone, clawing and / striking." The Coral Battleground (1977) was her account of the campaign to protect the "great water-gardens, lovely indeed as cherry boughs and flowers under the once clear sea. In The Cry for the Dead(1981) Wright examined the treatment of Aborigines and destruction of the environment by settlers in Central Queensland from the 1840s to the 1920s. In 1991 she resigned as patron of the Wildlife Preservation Society because of its failure to support Aboriginal land rights. As a literary critic Wright enjoyed a high reputation, and edited several collections of Australian verse. She was a friend of the Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal, whose work Wright helped to get published. Preoccupations in Australian Poetry(1965) was Wright's pioneering effort to reread such early Australian poets as Charles Harpur, Adam Lindsay Gordon, and Henry Kendall. When I was a child I saw a burning bird in a tree. I see became I am, I am became I see. (from 'To a Child') Wright received several awards, including the Grace Leven Prize (1950), the Australia-Britannica Award (1964), the Robert Frost Memorial Award (1977), the Australian World Prize (1984), the Queen's Medal for Poetry (1992). She had honorary degrees from several universities. In 1973-74 she was a member of the Australia Council. .

MICHAEL ONDAATJE Michael Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka on 12 September 1943. He moved to England in 1954, and in 1962 moved to Canada where he has lived ever since. He was educated at the University of Toronto and Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and began teaching at York University in Toronto in 1971. He published a volume of memoir, entitledRunning in the Family, in 1983. His collections of poetry include The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left Handed Poems (1981), which won the Canadian Governor General's Award in 1971; The Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems(1989); and Handwriting: Poems (1998). His first novel, Coming Through Slaughter (1976), is a fictional portrait of jazz musician Buddy Bolden. The English Patient (1992), set in Italy at the end of the Second World War, was joint winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction and was made into an Academy Award-winning film in 1996. Anil's Ghost (2000), set in Sri Lanka, tells the story of a young female anthropologist investigating war crimes for an international human rights group . Michael Ondaatje lives in Toronto with his wife, Linda Spalding, with whom he edits the literary journal Brick. His new novel is Divisadero (2007). Cinnamon Peeler Michael Ondaatje first published "The Cinnamon Peeler" in 1982 as part of his book Running in the Family. "The Cinnamon Peeler" appeared later in Ondaatje's collection Secular Love. As most critics note, this collection was influenced heavily by events in Ondaatje's life, namely his 1979 separation from his wife, Kim Jones, and his subsequent affair with another woman, Linda Spalding. The book is arranged into four different sections, which collectively detail the pain of Ondaatje's breakup and his path through despair to newfound love. "The Cinnamon Peeler" is located in the fourth and final section, "Skin Boat," and is one of the poems that glorifies love. In the poem, the speaker gives a very sensual description of his wife and their courtship, using the exotic qualities of cinnamon, especially its potent scent, to underscore his love and desire. Ondaatje's use of cinnamon, a plant found in his native Sri Lanka, indicates his desire to focus on his former homeland. Ondaatje, who has been a Canadian citizen since he was a teenager, often includes discussions of Sri Lanka in his works. Although critics responded favorably to the poems in Secular Love, this response pales in comparison to the critical and popular response that Ondaatje received for his third novel, The English Patient (1992), which was adapted into a blockbuster film in 1996. A copy of the poem can be found in The Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems, which was published in paperback by Vintage International in 1997. The author's Sri Lankin heritage is the background for the sensuous nature of this poem, and he utilizes a precious island spice as the symbolism for his desire. There are other indicators that define the island setting including the mention of markets, saffron, honey and a monsoon. Culturally, an island lifestyle is implied when the man discusses not being able to look directly at the young woman before marriage and the ever present mother and "rough brothers" who hover around the man's beloved. The role of cinnamon in the culture of Sri Lanka is important, and therefore it holds importance in the poem. The spice, although becoming more readily grown in more countries, was once grown only in Sri Lanka, adding to the spice's world value yet availability to natives. Cinnamon also involves several steps in..... When one first reads Ondaatje's "The Cinnamon Peeler," it is clear that the poem is about sex, specifically, the speaker's sexual desire for his wife, which he rekindles through a role-playing game. In this game, the speaker poses a hypothetical situation where he is a cinnamon peeler and his wife is therefore marked physically by the scent of his profession. This cinnamon scent, indeed, scent in general, takes on very sexual overtones as the poem progresses. In fact, the poem needs no help from any additional poetic techniques to underscore its sexual theme. Yet, Ondaatje deliberately constructs his poem in ways that heighten its....

The Cinnamon Peeler / by Michael Ondaatje

DetailedSummary
"The Cinnamon Peeler" is Michael Ondaatje's sensual poem of the erotic love a man possesses for his wife. The poem is written from the man's point of view as he speaks to his wife. The man poses a scenario in which he is a cinnamon peeler. In this scenario, the dust and residue from the profession will leave their traces on his wife's body as well as on their entire life. The "yellow bark dust" will remain on their bed, and the woman's breasts and

shoulders will emanate with the essence of the spice so that when she walks through the market everyone will know that her husband's hands have left their scented touch. Even blind men will be able to see the man's effect on the woman as she approaches, and no attempt to wash under rain gutters or in a monsoon will ever erase the potent scent from her body. The man mentions specific body locations that will be particularly vulnerable to his touch, including the woman's upper thigh and the area around her pubic hair. Even the woman's ankles will bear the man's invisible touch. The man moves from a description of the act of loving his wife to the longing felt before marriage when touching is forbidden and glances are stolen. Realizing that the woman's mother and brothers will be able to smell his desire, the man does many things with his hands to throw off the scent. He buries his hands in saffron, holds them over a tar pit and even helps the honey workers gather their fluid crop. The poem transitions to a situation between the two lovers, who are swimming. The woman is temporarily free of any trace of the cinnamon scent and realizes that the scent of nothingness is how the wives of grass cutters and the daughters of lime burners must feel. The woman appreciates her own good fortune and laments for the other women, who never know the enduring scent left by a lover. To the woman, this can be likened to being wounded without having any scar to show as evidence. At the end of the poem the woman invites her husband to touch her belly, and declaring herself to be the cinnamon peeler's wife, she beckons him to smell her.

Sweet Like a Crow

"The Sinhalese are beyond a doubt one of the least musical people in the world. It would be quite impossible to have less sense of pitch, line, or rhythm." - Paul Bowles Your voice sounds like a scorpion being pushed through a glass tube
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like someone has just trod on a peacock like wind howling in a coconut like a rusty bible, like someone pulling barbed wire across a stone courtyard, like a pig drowning, a vattacka being fried a bone shaking hands a frog singing at Carnegie Hall. Like a crow swimming in milk, like a nose being hit by a mango like the crowd at the Royal-Thornian match, a womb full of twins, a pariah dog with a magpie in its mouth like the midnight jet from Casablanca like Air Pakistan curry, a typewriter on fire, like a spirit in the gas which cooks your dinner, like a hundred pappadans being crunched, like someone uselessly trying to light 3 Roses matches in a dark room, the clicking sound of a reef when you put your head into the sea, a dolphin reciting epic poetry to a sleepy audience, the sound of a fan when someone throws brinjals at it, like pineapples being sliced in the Pettah market like betel juice hitting a butterfly in mid-air like a whole village running naked onto the street and tearing their sarongs, like an angry family pushing a jeep out of the mud, like dirt on the needle, like 8 sharks being carried on the back of a bicycle like 3 old ladies locked in the lavatory like the sound I heard when having an afternoon sleep and someone walked through my room in ankle bracelets. Michael Ondaatje

A. D. Hope Alec Derwent Hope (21 July 1907 13 July 2000) was an Australian poet and essayist known for his satirical slant. He was also a critic, teacher and academic. Life Hope was born in Cooma, New South Wales, and educated partly at home and in Tasmania. He attended Fort Street Boys High School, 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 theAustralian National University (ANU) when the two institutions merged, a chair he held until retiring in 1968. From 1968 was appointed Emeritus Professor at the ANU.[1] He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1972[2] and a Companion of the Order of Australia in 1981[3] and awarded many other honours. He died in Canberra, having suffered dementia in his last years, and is buried at the Queanbeyan Lawn Cemetery. Poet and critic 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 for offending his countrymen. He wrote a book of "answers" to other poems, including one in response to the poem "To His Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvell. The reviews he wrote in the 1940s and 50s were feared "for their acidity and intelligence. If his reviews hurt some writers - Patrick White included - they also sharply raised the standard of literary discussion in Australia."[4] However, Hope relaxed in later years. As poet Kevin Hart writes, "The man I knew, from 1973 to 2000, was invariably gracious and benevolent".[4] Hope wrote in a letter to the poet/academic, Catherine Cole: "Now I feel I've reached the pinnacle of achievement when you equate me with one of Yeats's 'wild, wicked old men'. I'm probably remarkably wicked but not very wild, I fear too much ingrained Presbyterian caution". [5] Cole suggests that Hope represented the three attributes that Vladimir Nabokov believed essential in a writer, "storyteller, teacher, enchanter".[5] Influence and impact Kevin Hart, reviewing Catherine Cole's memoir of Hope, writes that "When A. D. Hope died in 2000 at the age of 93, Australia lost its greatest living poet".[4] Hart goes on to say that when once asked what poets do for Australia, Hope replied that "They justify its existence". [5]

INTRODUCTION Hope is recognized as one of the most influential and celebrated Australian poets of the twentieth century. Critics classify him as a classic poet, in that much of his work utilized traditional forms and rejected modernist and postmodernist poetic trends. He also incorporated mythology, legends, and fables in his verse. Despite the anachronistic nature of Hope's poetic oeuvre, commentators praise his biting satire, the clarity of his language, and sophistication of his poetic vision and view him as an important contributor to traditional prosody in contemporary poetry. Biographical Information Hope was born on July 21, 1907, in Cooma, New South Wales, Australia, and spent most of his childhood in rural areas in New South Wales and Tasmania. He received his B.A. from Sydney University in 1928 and then went on to Oxford University for two years. He returned to Australia, working as a psychologist with the New South Wales Department of Labour and Industry. In 1937 he accepted a position as lecturer at Sydney Teachers' College, and then in 1945 at the University of Melbourne. In 1951 he was appointed the first Professor of English at Canberra University College, and held the position until his retirement in 1968. In his mid-thirties his poetry was starting to appear in periodicals, but it was not until 1955 that he published his first collection of poems, The Wandering Islands. After his retirement from teaching, he was appointed Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University. He was awarded the Robert Frost Award for Poetry in 1976, the Levinson Prize for Poetry in 1968, and the Myer Award for Australian Literature in 1967. He was awarded an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1972. He died on July 13, 2000 in Canberra, A.C.T, Australia. Major Works

Although Hope's poetry is regarded as stylistically conservativehe utilized the iambic quatrainthe subjects of his verse were varied in scope. He is considered a major writer of erotic verse. Several of his early poems, such as Phallus, reject the pleasures of sexual relationships and romantic attachment. Yet in later work, the beauty of the human body and the thrill of passion and erotic adventure become a central theme in many of his poems. In others he reflects on the dual nature of love; in Imperial Adam, for example, Adam finishes a pleasurable sexual tryst with Eve only to visualize that their act has unleashed the first murderer, their son Cain, on the world. Hope is also viewed as a satirical poet, as many of his works poke fun at technology, conformity, and the absurdity of modern life. In Australia he notes the lack of culture and intellectual challenges to be found in Australian society. The Return from the Freudian Islands skewers the trend of psychological theorizing. Other poems explore such topics as creativity, nature, music, and the wonders of science. Hope's incorporation of myth and legend is viewed as a defining characteristic of his poems. The End of the Journey is an imaginative and bleak retelling of the Ulysses-Penelope story. Paradise Saved and Imperial Adam concern the Edenic myth. In other works Hope discusses the role of the artist in contemporary society and asserts his theory of poetic expression. His long poem, Conversation with Calliope, investigates the status of epic poetry in our modern world. Critical Reception Much of the critical reaction to Hope's poetry focuses on his rejection of modernist and postmodernist poetic formsparticularly the free verse poemand his utilization of traditional structure as well as classical mythology and legend. His poetic theory has led many commentators to view his verse as neoclassical, outdated, and too conservativemore in line with eighteenth-century poetry than twentieth century verse. However, in recent years, critics have reassessed Hope's verse, and have found much value in his formalized style. Critics have noted the lack of any identifiable Australian material in his work and perceive him as an outsider within the tradition of Australian literature. Thematically, commentators have traced his treatment of eroticism and sexuality, and have detected a vein of male chauvinism in many of his poems. His satirical verse has been a recurring topic of critical attention, and his nonconformist and biting viewpoint has attracted mixed reactions. Moreover, he has been derided for the self-pity, strident tone, and condescension in some of his verse. In general, however, commentators commend his poetic achievement and regard him as one of the most important Australian poets of the twentieth century. About Australia

Although many poems glorify the country, some also contain themes of rebellion; not against authorities but against the culture of stoicism and the land itself. AD Hope's "Australia" is scathing towards the land; describing it as " drab green and desolate grey". He is even more scathing towards the Australian people; describing them as "monotonous tribes" whose boast is not to "live" but to "survive". Yet somewhat paradoxically, Hope seems to redeem Australia; telling how he gladly turns towards it, towards the " Arabian desert of the human mind". For Hope, it is in the desert where life springs; it is where the " prophets come".

AUSTRALIA /A D Hope A Nation of trees, drab green and desolate grey In the field uniform of modern wars, Darkens her hills, those endless, outstretched paws Of Sphinx demolished or stone lion worn away. They call her a young country, but they lie: She is the last of lands, the emptiest,

A woman beyond her change of life, a breast Still tender but within the womb is dry. Without songs, architecture, history: The emotions and superstitions of younger lands, Her rivers of water drown among inland sands, The river of her immense stupidity Floods her monotonous tribes from Cairns to Perth. In them at last the ultimate men arrive Whose boast is not: we live but we survive, A type who will inhabit the dying earth. And her five cities, like five teeming sores, Each drains her: a vast parasite robber-state Where second hand Europeans pullulate Timidly on the edge of alien shores. 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, Hoping, if still from the deserts the prophets come, Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare Springs in that waste, some spirit which escapes The learned doubt, the chatter of cultured apes Which is called civilization over there.

The A. D. Hope Centenary (The Weekend Australian, 21/07/2007) That the 100th anniversary of A. D. Hopes birth arrives just seven years after his death makes the task of reevaluation a more delicate one than usual. W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, both of whom share his centenary year, have been dead for over thirty years and forty years respectively. If the argument really begins in the obituaries, then the argument about Hope has only just begun. Add in the fact that his first collection didnt appear till 1955 (1928 and 1929 are the equivalent dates for Auden and MacNeice) and any thoroughgoing reassessment is bound to look like jumping the gun. Well, I suppose you have to start somewhere Hopes first poems, which began to appear in literary magazines in the 1920s, displayed, not only formal skill, but also an encouraging determination to take on existential themes. One of those themes was the possibility of spiritual transcendence in a Godless universe. Unfortunately, one of the paths to transcendence seemed to be through sexual intercourse, the often unsparing depictions of which meant that the majority of the poetry-reading public remained Hopeless until The Wandering Islands was published in 1955. No doubt they thought it worth the wait. Some of the poems go straight into memory. Note how, in the following lines, the exalted language (a hundred raptures) gives way to the bathetic image of the worm as good a description of Le Petit Mort as one is likely to get in two couplets. (Note, too, the quality of the technical performance, the way the lineation, assonance and scrambled metre underscore the sense. In whatever way this was deemed to be offensive, it certainly wasnt offensive to the ear.) Down through a hundred raptures I Slide weakly out of her and lie Like a wet worm upon the boards, And nobody at all applauds. (Three Romances I) Or consider these wonderful lines from The Cheek, the poetic precision of knees / Nuzzle, the delectable plumpness of amplitude:

The feet at their remote antipodes Twine their smooth roots; at Capricorn the knees Nuzzle together; intershafted lies The amplitude of firm and polished thighs It wasnt only the sexually constipated who found this kind of thing distasteful. Thanks to poems such as Imperial Adam, in which Eve is described as This plump gourd and taken from behind by Adam, Phallic Alec also attracted the unpainted eye of feminism. The problem was not that his women were sexualised. The problem was that his sexual candour was not matched by psychological realism. This left him open to the charge of pornography of the sexual objectification of women a charge that has proven extremely tenacious, even amongst sympathetic critics. The poet Vincent Buckley, for example, wrote of Hopes bitter carnality, even a kind of bestiality. Bestiality was hard to avoid, given that one of Hopes obsessions was classical mythology, in which sexual encounters between man and beast (or woman and beast) are not uncommon. Hope, indeed, was a veritable Tomb Raider when it came to the myths and legends of yore such that a decent mythological dictionary is an essential tool when reading him (as, indeed, is an ordinary dictionary; nescience, susurrus and entelechy are just three of the words I had to look up). These lines are from The End of a Journey. A farm-cart by the doorway dripped and stank, Piled with the victims of his mighty bow. Each with her broken neck, each with a blank, Small, strangled face, the dead girls in a row Swung as the cold airs moved them to and fro Thus the victims of Telemachus are brought, if not precisely to life, at least into grimly physical being. Clearly, these early poems were evidence of a significant poetic gift. It is all the more remarkable, then, that Hope not only didnt develop, but seemed, as early as the 1960s, to suffer a partial haemorrhaging of his powers. Take, for example, the lengthy poem The Double Looking Glass (1963), in which Hope retells the Apocryphal story of Susannah and the lecherous elders. While there are flashes of the early brilliance the dragon-fly dim-darting in the stream that Follows and watches with enormous eyes / His blue narcissus glitter in the air the corny imagery and synthetic emotion combine to undercut the whole. For now his craft has passed the straits and now Into my shoreless sea he drives alone. Islands of spice await his happy prow And fabulous deeps support and bear him on. Even the explicitly Australian emphasis in poems such as Hay Fever and Beyond Khancoban could not force out the archaic register, with its pleonasms and syntactical inversions. Moreover, a certain laziness set in. In the opening stanza of Moschus Moschiferus the final line fairly limps to its conclusion. In the high jungle where Assam meets Tibet The small Kastura, most archaic of deer, Were driven in herds to cram the hunters net And slaughtered for the musk-pods which they bear If Hopes poetry was looking a little slack from the early 1960s on, his critical position was adamantine. Always a fearsome and a fearless reviewer (his verdict on Whites The Tree of Man pretentious and illiterate verbal sludge has passed into Australian literary folklore), Hope was also a big-picture thinker whose comments on the classicromantic quarrel and laments for the demise of shaping forms such as the ode, the epistle and the verse tragedy give us a clue as to how and why he wrote himself into a poetic corner. Intellectually, Hope was a classicist who thought that Romantic self-expression had done for the discursive modes and that Poetry, at the nadir of this search for its essence, became the formless babble and vomit of the poets subconscious mind.

This wasnt just a losing battle, it was a non-battle a phony war. (It was also a gift to the Literary Critters, who set about tying themselves in knots over a poet whose Apollonian formalism was tantalisingly at odds with his Dionysian subject matter.) Nevertheless, Hope seemed to believe it and his stance soon began to shape the poetry, which became progressively less emotional and more (and fatally) intellectual. There are hints of this even in the early poems. This is from the end of The Death of the Bird, the stand-out poem in The Wandering Islands: She feels it close now, the appointed season: The invisible thread is broken as she flies; Suddenly, without warning, without reason, The guiding spark of instinct winks and dies. And darkness rises from the eastern valleys, And the winds buffet her with their hungry breath, And the great earth, with neither grief nor malice, Receives the tiny burden of her death. If that last line doesnt melt your heart, then ask the nurse to check your pulse. Likewise the simple inevitability of winks and dies in the penultimate stanza. But wait. It isnt the penultimate stanza, but rather the pre-penultimate one. The penultimate stanza follows it: Try as she will, the trackless world delivers No way, the wilderness of light no sign, The immense and complex map of hills and rivers Mocks her small wisdom with its vast design. Strictly speaking, the birds small wisdom ended on the previous line, when the neurons in its brain ceased to fire. But Hope wants to get this thought in anyway, even at the expense of the poems visual power. In his later poetry, you get the thought, but the visual power was all behind him. One of the things good poetry does is give definite expression to indefinite feelings. Hope, by contrast, wanted poetry to give definite expression to definite thoughts and only such feelings as could be netted, pinned to the board, and analysed. Always adept at thinking in verse (especially in his rhyming couplets a sure sign of his Augustan proclivities), he came to distrust that emotional intelligence without which poetry ceases to live. Poems need a personality. Hope hid his, and his poetry suffered. Possibly he ran out of inspiration and so set about trying to convince himself that inspiration wasnt important. Whatever the truth, he became an anomaly a sporadically excellent poet, yes, but an eccentric and rather marginal one, and certainly not the poetic force, at once traditional and revolutionary, augured by the early poems. Fortunately, we have those early poems to remind us what we never got.

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