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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, had a notable influence upon modernism.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Proto-modernist 3 The First World War 4 See also 5 Works 6 References 7 Notes

[edit] Early life

Hulme was born at Gratton Hall, Endon, Staffordshire, the son of Thomas and Mary Hulme. He was educated at Newcastle-under-Lyme High School and, from 1902, St John's College, Cambridge, where he read mathematics, but was sent down in 1904 after rowdy behaviour on Boat Race night. He was thrown out of Cambridge a second time after a scandal involving a Roedean girl). He returned to his studies at University College, London, before travelling around Canada, and spending time in Brussels, acquiring languages.

[edit] Proto-modernist

From about 1907 Hulme became interested in philosophy, translating works by Henri Bergson and sitting in on lectures at Cambridge. He translated Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence. The most important influences on his thought were Bergson and, later, Wilhelm Worringer (1881-1965), German art historian and critic; and in particular his Abstraktion und Einfühlung (Abstraction and Empathy, 1908).

Hulme 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 Ezra Pound and F. S. Flint. 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, consisting of five poems (a sixth was added later). In his critical writings Hulme also influenced T. S. Eliot. 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 effect 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 further to the right after 1911 as a result of contact 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.

[edit] See also

• A Lecture on Modern Poetry

[edit] Works

• Georges Sorel, "The Ethics of Violence." Reflections on Violence (1912) translator
• Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art (1924) edited by Herbert Read
• Notes on Language and Style (1929)
• T. E. Hulme, The collected writings (1996, OUP) edited by Karen Csengeri
• Selected writings (2003, Fyfield Books)

[edit] References

• The Life and Opinions of T. E. Hulme (1960) Alun Jones,
• T. E. Hulme (1982, Carcanet Press reprint) Michael Roberts
• The Short Sharp Life of T. E. Hulme (2002) Robert Ferguson

[edit] Notes