Mass public entertainment pop concerts, major sporting events, big box office films and bestselling books are straightforward commercial investments which usually make good profits. The kind of ‘entertainment’ that attracts a more specialised audience, or which hopes to cater for or foster special or adventurous taste has, throughout history, needed patronage, whether from the Esterhazys, Medici, Southamptons and Rockefellers or, in this century, from governments.

One result of public funding that is often overlooked by adverse critics of the Literature Board’s publishing policies is the healthy increase in belletrist writing and publication; works that include the literary and critical writings of Douglas Stewart and James McAuley; Bernard Smith’s elegant art history and criticism, and more innovative writing like Colin Talbot’s Greatest Hits.

The audience for books of this order, and for The Pack of Autolycus, a distinguished recent example, may be specialised but not necessarily, or even often, specialist. When an A. D. Hope presents his literary theories and discoveries to specialists his forum is a learned journal or academic occasion; his manner of presentation and discourse will not be at all the same as when he displays his ideas and pleasures for wider enjoyment.

The title of The Pack of Autolycus derives from Shakespeare’s Autolycus, the rogue ‘who, being as I am, littered under Mercury, was likewise a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles’ – trifles, says Hope that are: ‘the result of forty years spent in hanging around the purlieus of scholarship and criticism ... because of an idle curiosity (which) begot speculation and speculation in turn led to an attempt to solve a problem.’ He wishes his offerings to entertain – they do.

Consider the first essay, ‘Beowulf and the Heroic Age’. Since I learned of Beowulf’s existence for Leaving Certificate English in 1940 I’ve had no occasion to consider Beowulf except peripherally when, years ago, Roland Robinson became converted to the epic, obsessed by Grendel and impelled to experiment in his own poetry with that metre which Hope describes as: ‘Vigorous short lines, divided in the centre by a strongly marked break, so that to our ears it is apt to have a rather monotonous rocking horse effect … a pattern quite alien to our expectation of regular recurrences and not susceptible to most of the effects we look for in our own poetry.’

Hope discusses Beowulf’s links with times and forms that were already remote, antique, in its own era. He sees the work as ‘an attempt at an heroic epic on Christian terms’ whose author made use of ancient, but then still popular heroes, and ‘boldly enters the field as a competitor, just as General Booth took over the tunes and to some extent the spirit of popular songs for his Salvation Army hymns.’

Hope’s compelling ideas about the Heroic Age and tradition arouse my ‘idle curiosity’; for instance, rightly or wrongly, I perceive intriguing analogies between the times when Beowulf was written and present day Japan. Japan’s culture is much closer to its equivalent Heroic Age than is our own. Could it be that certain Japanese codes of honor and behavior (some forms of suicide, for instance) which mystify westerners now, would have seemed not only acceptable, but inevitable to ancient Europe? If so, certain central inspirations in Japanese art and literature, like the story of the forty-seven Ronin, take on a different aspect.

How mad was Christopher Smart? For how long was he severely mad and for how long only slightly? To what extent has his undoubted derangement deterred critics and editors from a proper consideration of the intricate framework he devised for his celebratory poetry? Or from thoroughly investigating the kind of books that Smart and his circle read and discussed? Once you perceive the architecture, Hope says, and make allowance for outmoded theories which seem crazy now, but were accepted as reasonable in Smart’s time, you gain a much richer understanding of his poetry.

Elsewhere Hope has stated his belief that poetry is essentially a celebration of life but nowhere more forcefully than at the end of ‘The Apocalypse of Christopher Smart’. He writes:

I have very little faith, as a professional critic of literature, in most of the descriptions or definitions of poetry on which the various schools depend. ‘The imitation of nature’, ‘the overflow of powerful emotions’, a ‘criticism of life’ – well, yes and no: none of them seems to me a satisfactory basis of criticism. As a poet, I find them exasperating. I know of no definition of the nature and function of poetry that satisfies me better than that which is the theme of A Song to David: the view of poetry as celebration, the celebration of the world by the creation of something that adds to and completes the order of nature. A Song to David has the added beauty, for me, of being itself a celebration of what to me is the real nature of the poet’s art.

In twelve essays Hope ranges down the centuries asking questions, bringing to light forgotten things, taking a fresh look at literature and paintings; to elucidate Marlowe he offers an elegant description of Benvenuto Cellini’s famous salt cellar! Is it possible or even likely that Emily Bronte was a sensible, practical, balanced woman whose poetry and Wuthering Heights owe everything to her imaginative and inventive genius and precious little to those passions and traumas ascribed to her by critics who pad out a dearth of information with their own invention? Did George Borrow live his extraordinary life in a sort of perpetual dream? Why is Kangaroo such a silly book? It is always nice to have one’s pet dislikes confirmed by a master and Hope confesses to being ‘a hostile witness who thinks Lawrence an extremely overrated writer’ as witness also his poem Dunciad Minor: ‘Peevish and arrogant, he vents a flood/Of words which he calls “thinking with the blood’’’.

Here are Wordsworth and others on the lookout for picturesque hard-luck stories; an essay on Tennyson and Princess Ida with the splendid conclusion: ‘One cannot help wondering how Princess Ida’s ‘married life turned out after all’ matching the memorable summing up of Marlowe and Chapman: ‘the one sails superbly like a swan, the other waddles like a goose’.

After I’d read·through The Pack of Autolycus I reflected on Alec Hope himself. With him I do not claim old or long acquaintance but we served together on the Literature Board during 1973 and, one Hobart morning, met at 5.30 for a walk through the city of Hope’s youth which I’ll never forget. I know him as a genial, amiable, open-minded, inquisitive, thorough and imaginative man. Never stuffy. One of the best young innovative poets owes her early Literature Board support to his perceptive championship.

Now: I can reconcile the man I know with his poetry as I read it, and with his critical works and with such of his splendid bawdy and comic verse as has come my way; but I cannot reconcile my vision of Hope and his work with most published Australian criticism of his poetry. It is said he is a puritan – albeit in a particular sense of the word – (Douglas Stewart); that ‘fundamentally Hope downgrades women and sexuality’ (John Docker); that his poems ‘seldom if ever spring from any underlying recognisable compassionate concern’ (Judith Wright). Vincent Buckley’s assessment in Essays on Poetry 1957 is good, but of course deals only with earlier poetry.

Let me end this piece with thanks to Alec / Autolycus Hope for the beguiling pleasures of his ‘roguery’. I add a wish that, and soon, some peer of his own will accord him perceptive justice as full, fair and witty as he devotes to other writers.