edited by Samuel Hynes

Thomas Ernest Hulme (16 September 1883 – 28 September 1917) was an English writer who, during his informal tenure from 1909 as critic for The New Age, edited by A. R. Orage, exerted a notable influence on London modernism.


Proto-modernist

From about 1907 Hulme became interested in philosophy, translating works by Henri Bergson and sitting in on lectures at Cambridge. He also translated Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence. The most important influences on his thought appear to have been, first, Bergson and, later, Wilhelm Worringer (1881-1965), German art historian and critic; and in particular his Abstraktion und Einfühlung (Abstraction and Empathy, 1908). These ideas Hulme synthesised with his own proto-modernism and intense combativeness.

Hulme also at this time developed an interest in poetry, though he did not sustain it longer than a few years. He was made secretary of The Poets' Club, attended by such establishment figures as Edmund Gosse and Henry Newbolt. There he encountered Pound and F. S. Flint, a poetic follower. In late 1908 Hulme delivered his paper A Lecture on Modern Poetry to the club. Robert Frost met Hulme in 1913 and was influenced by his ideas.[1]

Hulme wrote a few verses himself. The Complete Poetical Works of T.E. Hulme was published in The New Age in 1912, at which point it consisted of five poems (a sixth was added later). He was, however, the first Imagist poet, and his manifesto for Imagism had a direct effect on Ezra Pound. Hulme also influenced T. S. Eliot through his critical writings, in which he distinguished between Romanticism, a style informed by a belief in the infinite in man and nature, characterised by Hulme as "spilt religion", and Classicism, a mode of art stressing human finitude, formal restraint, concrete imagery and, in Hulme's words, "dry hardness".[2]

Hulme also had a major impact on Wyndham Lewis (quite literally when they came to blows over Kate Lechmere; Lewis ended the worse for it, hung upside down by the cuffs of his trousers from the railings of Great Ormond Street).[3] He championed the art of Jacob Epstein and David Bomberg, and was a friend of Gaudier-Brzeska, as well as being in at the birth of Lewis's literary magazine BLAST and vorticism.

Hulme's politics were conservative and he moved towards a far-right position, notably after he had contact in 1911 with Pierre Lasserre, who was associated with Action Française.

[edit] The First World War

Hulme volunteered as an artilleryman in 1914, and served with the Royal Marine Artillery in France and Belgium. He kept up his writing for The New Age, with "War Notes" written under the pen name "North Staffs", and "A Notebook", which contains some of his most organised critical writing. He was wounded in 1916. Back at the front in 1917, he was killed by a shell at Oostduinkerke near Nieuwpoort, in West Flanders.