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.

Susan Lever is a literary critic and general editor of the Cambria Australian Literature Series. She was made a life member of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature for her ‘outstanding contribution to ASAL and to the scholarship of Australian literature more broadly.’ Lever taught for many years at the University of New South Wales, Canberra, and she is the author and editor of several books, including The Oxford Book of Australian Women's Verse, Real Relations: The Feminist Politics of Form in Australian Fiction, and A Question of Commitment: Australian Literature in the Twenty Years after the War. Her biography A.D. Hope: A Life was published by La Trobe University Press (Black Inc.) in April 2026.