T.E. Hulme
born Sept. 16, 1883, Endon,
Staffordshire, Eng.
died Sept. 28, 1917, France
English aesthetician, literary critic,
and poet, one of the founders of the Imagist
movement and a major 20th-century literary
influence.
Hulme was educated at Newcastle-under-Lyme
grammar school and went to St. John’s
College, Cambridge, but was expelled for
rowdyism in 1904. Thereafter he lived mainly
in London, translating the works of Henri
Bergson and Albert Sorel and, with Ezra
Pound, F.S. Flint, and Hilda Doolittle
(H.D.), instigating the Imagist movement.
Five of his poems were published in New Age
(January 1912) and reprinted at the end of
Pound’s Ripostes. Before his death while
fighting in World War I, Hulme defended
militarism against the pacifism of Bertrand
Russell.
Hulme posited that post-Renaissance
humanism was coming to an end and believed
that its view of man as without inherent
limitations and imperfections was
sentimental and based on false premises. His
hatred of romantic optimism, his view of man
as limited and absurd, his theology, which
emphasized the doctrine of original sin, and
his advocacy of a “hard, dry” kind of art
and poetry foreshadowed the disillusionment
of many writers of the 1920s. He advocated
the “geometrical” art of Pablo Picasso and
Wyndham Lewis as the potential expression of
a new, more disciplined religious outlook.
Hulme published little in his lifetime,
but his work and ideas sprang into fame in
1924, when his friend Herbert Read assembled
some of his notes and fragmentary essays
under the title Speculations. Additional
compilations were edited by Read (Notes on
Language and Style, 1929) and by Sam Hynes
(Further Speculations, 1955). Many of his
noted contemporaries hailed him as a great
thinker, though later opinion has tended to
downplay his originality.
