Alec Derwent Hope (July 21 1907 - July 13 2000) was an Australian poet and essayist, known for his satirical slant, who was also a critic, teacher and academic. He was born in Cooma, New South Wales, and educated partly at home and in Tasmania. He attended 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 as 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 then took the post as the first professor of English at the newly-founded Canberra University , later the Australian National University, a chair he held until retiring in 1967.

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. His influences were Auden, and Swinburne; he was omnivorous, very largely self-taught, and with a talent to offend his countrymen.

He was awarded an OBE in 1972, and many other honours. He died in Canberra.

Works

• The Wandering Islands (1955),
• Poems (1960),
• The cave and the spring (1965) essays
• Collected poems (1966),
• New poems (1965-1969),
• Dunciad Minor (1970) satire
• A midsummer eve's dream (1970)
• Native companions (1974),
• A late picking (1975),
• The pack of Autolycus (1978) essays
• The new Cratylus (1979) poetics
• A book of answers (1978)
• The drifting continent (1979) poems
• Antechinus (1981),
• The tragical history of Dr Faustus (1982),
• The age of reason (1985) poems
• Ladies from the sea (1987) drama
• Orpheus (1991) poems
• Chance encounters memoirs