A.D. Hope and Patrick White are towering figures of 20th-century Australian culture. Few cast larger literary shadows over the postwar period. White, with his dizzying, monumental novels and Nobel prize, holds pride of place. But Hope, as a critic, poet and academic, exercised a considerable influence over his generation. His formidable intellect and commanding sense of language and poetic tradition imbued his judgements with the quality of an almost divine law.
Famously, in his review of White’s novel The Tree of Man, Hope described the writing as “pretentious and illiterate verbal sludge”. That particular judgement has not aged well.
