A.D. Hope was born in Cooma, southern NSW, in 1907, the son of a Presbyterian minister. He was educated at the University of Sydney and Oxford University, and lectured at Sydney Teachers' College and Melbourne University, before being appointed Professor of English at Canberra University College, later to become the Australian National University. He retired from this position in 1968 to devote himself to poetry.
His first volume of poems, The Wandering Islands was published in 1955. His subsequent collections include Poems (1960), Collected Poems 1930-1965 (1966), New Poems 1965-1969 (1969), A Late Picking (1975), A Book of Answers (1978), Antechinus: Poems 1975-1980 (1981), The Age of Reason (1985), Orpheus (1991) and Selected Poems (1992).
Hope was also one of the foremost critics of his generation and an authoritative commentator on Australian literature. His essays have been collected in a number of volumes, The Cave and the Spring (1965), Native Companions: Essays and Comments on Australian Literature 1936-1966 (1974), The Pack of Autolycus (1979), and The New Cratylus: Notes on the Craft of Poetry (1979).
A.D. Hope died in 2001. His work is now available in the volume A.D. Hope: Selected Poetry and Prose, edited by David Brooks (Halstead Press, 2000). Hope's autobiography, Chance Encounters, was published in 1992. Kevin Hart has written a critical monograph on his work, A.D. Hope (Oxford, 1992).