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418 VII CONCLUSION the Preface to the Second Edition 418 VII CONCLUSION The Preface to the Second Edition of The Cave and the Spring has Hopes explanation that the essays are written much as poems are written, to, show forth and to illuminate an idea rather than to argue and demonstrate a truth. Notable aspects of the body of the poetry to the mid-1980s are the persistence with which themes are reworked and the restlessness of their reworking. The Preface to The Cave and the Spring confirms the conclusion that Hopes poetry is a personal dialectic, in which he relentlessly reappraises those issues he identifies as fundamental in the human exp erience. He reaches few hard-and-fast conclusions because the central concern which which the poetry deals is the human state in its relation to the metaphysical, to the believed but unknowable in time. Rather than showing a poetic working towards conclusions, the body of the poetry shows that Hope began writing with a set of convictions and that the poetry treats the ramifications of those convictions, as they are enlarged by Hopes submission of experience to a perception of the metaphysical. It is this which has led Hope so often to startle his readers by treating taboo subjects in poetry. The juvenilia introduces the concerns of temporality and eternity, heroic endeavour and physical passion, which are amplified in the mature poetry. It shows that influences encountered by the poet in maturity impinged on a body of ideas which was in place by the time Hope was grown up. The spiritualising nature of the poets task, and the difficulty of bringing a spiritual influence to bear on the minds of ordinary human beings, are among Hopes most insistent themes. His long and careful preparation to become a poet reflects the keenness of his youthful appreciation of the significance of his accepted role. The poetic maturity 419 which Hope achieves from the time of his marriage stems mainly from the emotional force of the confusion of his responses to sexuality. Other immediately close contributions are made by his intellectual encounters with the poetry of Brennan, Andersons form of empiricism and McAuley as poet. His early apprehension of the need for heroism and the difficulties of heroic endeavour becomes sharply focussed from the end of the 1930s, as a terrifying awareness of the strength of the competing passions within self catches his imagination. In the poetry of The Wandering Islands period, the amplification of Hopes early concerns is most noticeable in the plethora of sexual themes, which includes the Fall, the nature of woman and the complexity of male being. The poetry of the early mature period establishes the pattern of the development of Hopes thematic concerns, as the implications of his initial convictions begin to proliferate. Poetry published later than The Wandering Islands documents refinements and extensions of his early mature period perceptions; there is no stasis in treatment of preoccupations. The one issue on which his thinking snags is Max Harris as a literary figure, an issue which is only partly connected with Popes literary concerns. Hope has identified sleazy literature with Harris but the Hope-Harris comic hatchet has more than a literary edge; it indicates human vulnerability to purely personal emotion. Hopes "Visitant" is a disarming statement from Habbakuk Hope that the human experience has a claim on him in its own right. It takes to a peak of expression the poets conception of himself as a poet-observer who has a mandate to see the whole human state steadily and clearly but, at the same time, it allows that the observer is also a Participant in the human state. Hopes poetry pivots on this double axis, of the poet who is the elect of the gods and also the son of fallen Adam. The poetry arises from 420 the tensions between the man and the poet. The human mind and its capacity to respond to intimations of a spiritual state beyond the here and now, and the abstraction of thought which language permits, are Hopes rationale for being a poet. Comment has often been made on his Presbyterian upbringing but the bearing on his poetry of his training in psychology has been overlooked. Both aspects of Hopes intellectual conditioning are evident in the poetry. Oppositions between Old Testament certainties and Modernist reappraisals of established standards for mans use of his human state contribute to the clashes of ideas which characterise Hopes poetry. An unanticipated conclusion to emerge from this study is that Hope has been strongly drawn to ideas which are the basis of Surrealist theories of art. It should not be a surprising conclusion, given Hopes early and sustained sense of a mystical dimension to human experience. His drive to reach beyond the physical plane of existence accords with the term surreal, or superreal; and it accords with his understanding that mind is mans means of extending experience beyond the sensory. His studies in psychology, philosophy, language and literature are investigations into the workings and products of the mind, which is appropriate, for Popes passionate interest is in the possibilities that mind allows to man. Some early mature period resistance to implications of psychology is countered by Hopes employment of introspection. The contribution of dreams to the supply of material for poetry is given increasing recognition in Hopes middle and later periods. Adverse comments directed at Surrealist writing become catch-cries which have no meaning specific to the source of material or the content of Surrealist art; they relate to the absence of traditional form from the work of some poets and what Hope sees as a consequent removal of the element of poetry from their work. 421 Hopes most impressive poetry to date is written later than the works in The Wandering Islands, during the years after he rationally resolved his earlier difficulties in reconciling daemonic promptings and physical drives. During his middle period, the poets attention is directed to understanding of the human experience in the context of an ordered universe and he creates poetry in which he explores the possibilities of consciousness and the extension of consciousness through poetic vision. The raw passion which marks much of the earlier poetry is replaced by controlled energy. The poetry is at times marked by an exhilaration derived from apprehension of the scope of the temporal adventure. When the post-1970 poetry is considered in relation to Hopes earlier poetry, some marked changes in achieved attitudes are seen. The most striking change of attitude is towards rationality. As the poets concern with the mystical is directed to specific instances of mans use of his mind, rather than, as it is in the middle period, to the vision of universal order, confusions and contradictions in the theme of rationality appear in the poetry and some prose items. Hope does not yield his conviction that mans mind is his means to spiritual growth but he accords to the collective unconscious a mystical importance and questions rationality. A conclusion may be drawn that, in view of the probabilities of mankinds self-destruction because of intellectual hubris, Hope sees that consciousness, by itself, is inadequate to mans needs and that the full resources of the human mind must be exploited. Such a conclusion admits both Hopes later period stances to rationality, though none of the relevant poems or prose items specifies the point about the full resources of the mind. It must, at least at present, remain a tentative conclusion. The poets attitudes to will and pride, which, in relation to poets, enter the early mature poetry, are reversed in the later poetry, 422 but there the application is to scientists, who, in using their limited rational capabilities, demonstrate their incapacity for a poetic reception of the mystical in the universe. A great tension lies behind Hopes developments of the themes of sexuality, will and pride; and, in his later period, the poetry indicates that the source of this tension is a disparity between expectations about the cap acity of the human mind and the factual and historical evidence of its limitations. Physical and spiritual passions are not subject to intellectually derived will and pride; and intellect appears to be inimical to spirituality. In the later period, there is a descent to the demotic in the 1 language of some of the published p oetry and, in some poems, a flippant treatment of persistent themes. 2A larrikin element comes to the surface in, for example, "Three Songs for Monaro Pubs" and "Transplant Songs", which identifies Hope as a Currency Lad, so that the label of Australian Poet for Hope assumes an unusual validity. These observations argue that the older Hope has become less consistent in applying to his poetry-making the view of the poet as the agent of the spiritual transformation of the world. The conclusion to be drawn is that Hopes engagement with the question of redemption has entered the closely personal province of the man, who has, to a considerable extent, withdrawn from the poet. Certain as Hope is in his ideas concerning the poets high purpose, his concept of the poet has undergone revision and the poetry reflects his various, and sometimes cumulative, perceptions of the poet as the 1. e.g. "The Transit of Venus," in The Age of Reason, p.70; "Memoire DOutre Tombe". 2. e.g. "Intimations of Mortality". 423 elect of the gods, Homeric hero, Nietzschean aristocrat, watcher and humanist. A conviction that the poet is outside ordinary humanity is unshaken by the fact that the poet is also a man but "Exercise on a Sphere", especially stanza nine, suggests that the older Hope has come to understand that, while the poet within the poet can offer advice, the man is the self who has to grapple with the problems of his human being and effect his own redemption.
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