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 AgeThe New Age was a British literary magazine, noted for its wide influence under the editorship of A. R. Orage from 1907 to 1922. It began life in 1894 as a publication of the Christian Socialist movement, but in 1907 Alfred Orage and Holbrook Jackson, who had been running the Leeds Arts Club,...
, edited by A. R. Orage, had a notable influence upon
modernismModernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes both a set of cultural tendencies and an array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late...
.
Hulme was born at Gratton Hall,
EndonEndon is a village within the Staffordshire Moorlands district of Staffordshire, England. It is southwest of Leek and north-northeast of Stoke-on-Trent....
,
StaffordshireStaffordshire is a landlocked county in the West Midlands region of England. Part of the National Forest lies within its borders...
, the son of Thomas and Mary Hulme. He was educated at
Newcastle-under-LymeNewcastle-under-Lyme, known simply as Castle to many local people, is a market town in Staffordshire, England, and is the principal town of the Borough of Newcastle-under-Lyme. It is part of The Potteries Urban Area and North Staffordshire. In the 2001 census the town had a population of 73,944...
High School and, from 1902,
St John's College, CambridgeSt John's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge.The college has fixed assets of £567,390,000, granting it the largest endowment per student of any Cambridge college...
, where he read mathematics, but was sent down in 1904 after rowdy behaviour on Boat Race night.
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 AgeThe New Age was a British literary magazine, noted for its wide influence under the editorship of A. R. Orage from 1907 to 1922. It began life in 1894 as a publication of the Christian Socialist movement, but in 1907 Alfred Orage and Holbrook Jackson, who had been running the Leeds Arts Club,...
, edited by A. R. Orage, had a notable influence upon
modernismModernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes both a set of cultural tendencies and an array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late...
.
Early life
Hulme was born at Gratton Hall,
EndonEndon is a village within the Staffordshire Moorlands district of Staffordshire, England. It is southwest of Leek and north-northeast of Stoke-on-Trent....
,
StaffordshireStaffordshire is a landlocked county in the West Midlands region of England. Part of the National Forest lies within its borders...
, the son of Thomas and Mary Hulme. He was educated at
Newcastle-under-LymeNewcastle-under-Lyme, known simply as Castle to many local people, is a market town in Staffordshire, England, and is the principal town of the Borough of Newcastle-under-Lyme. It is part of The Potteries Urban Area and North Staffordshire. In the 2001 census the town had a population of 73,944...
High School and, from 1902,
St John's College, CambridgeSt John's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge.The college has fixed assets of £567,390,000, granting it the largest endowment per student of any Cambridge college...
, 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
RoedeanRoedean School is an independent girls' school in Roedean village on the outskirts of Brighton, East Sussex in the United Kingdom. The school overlooks the sea and is situated close to the marina. Students attend from many different parts of the world...
girl). He returned to his studies at University College, London, before travelling around
CanadaCanada is a country occupying most of northern North America, extending from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
, and spending time in
BrusselsBrussels , officially the Brussels Region or Brussels-Capital Region , is the de facto capital city of the European Union and the largest urban area in Belgium...
, acquiring languages.
Proto-modernist
From about 1907 Hulme became interested in
philosophyPhilosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing these questions by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on reasoned...
, translating works by
Henri BergsonHenri-Louis Bergson was a major French philosopher, influential especially in the first half of the 20th century.- Overview :...
and sitting in on lectures at Cambridge. He translated
Georges SorelGeorges Eugène Sorel was a French philosopher and theorist of revolutionary syndicalism. His notion of the power of myth in people's lives inspired Marxists and Fascists, it is, together with his defense of violence, the contribution for which he is most often remembered. Orson J...
's
Reflections on Violence. The most important influences on his thought were Bergson and, later,
Wilhelm WorringerWilhelm Worringer was a German art historian. He is known in connection with expressionism. Through his influence on T. E. Hulme his ideas had an effect on early British modernism, especially vorticism....
(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 GosseSir Edmund William Gosse CB was an English poet, author and critic, the son of Philip Henry Gosse and Emily Bowes.-Career:...
and
Henry NewboltSir Henry John Newbolt, CH was an English poet. He is best remembered for Vitaï Lampada, a lyrical piece used for propaganda purposes during the First World War.-Background:...
. There he encountered
Ezra PoundEzra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet, critic and intellectual who was a major figure of the Modernist movement in the first half of the 20th century. He is generally considered the poet most responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry...
and
F. S. Flint Frank Stuart Flint was an English poet and translator who was a prominent member of the Imagist group.He is mostly known for his participation in the "School of Images" with Ezra Pound and T. E. Hulme in 1909, which was to serve as the theoretical basis for the later imagist movement...
. In late 1908 Hulme delivered his paper
A Lecture on Modern PoetryA Lecture on Modern Poetry was a paper by T. E. Hulme which was read to the Poets' Club around the end of 1908. It is a concise statement of Hulme's influential advocacy of free verse. The lecture was not published during Hulme's lifetime....
to the club.
Robert FrostRobert Lee Frost was an American poet. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and...
met Hulme in 1913 and was influenced by his ideas.
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. EliotThomas Stearns Eliot, OM , was a poet, playwright, and literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Among his most famous writings are The Love Song of J...
. He distinguished between
RomanticismRomanticism is a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength during the Industrial Revolution...
, a style informed by a belief in the infinite in man and nature, characterised by Hulme as "spilt religion", and
ClassicismClassicism, in the arts, refers generally to a high regard for classical antiquity, as setting standards for taste which the classicists seek to emulate. The art of classicism typically seeks to be formal and restrained: of the Discobolus Sir Kenneth Clark observed, "if we object to his restraint...
, a mode of art stressing human finitude, formal restraint, concrete imagery and, in Hulme's words, "dry hardness".
Hulme also had a major effect on
Wyndham LewisPercy Wyndham Lewis was an English painter and author . He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art, and edited the literary magazine of the Vorticists, BLAST...
(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). He championed the art of
Jacob EpsteinSir Jacob Epstein was an American-born British sculptor who worked chiefly in the UK, where he pioneered modern sculpture, often producing controversial works that challenged taboos concerning what public artworks appropriately depict...
and
David BombergDavid Garshen Bomberg was an English painter, and one of the Whitechapel Boys.The most audacious of the exceptional generation of artists that studied under Henry Tonks at the Slade School of Art, Bomberg painted a series of complex geometric compositions combining the influences of cubism and...
, and was a friend of Gaudier-Brzeska, as well as being in at the birth of Lewis's
literary magazineA literary magazine is a periodical devoted to literature in a broad sense. Literary magazines usually publish short stories, poetry and essays along with literary criticism, book reviews, biographical profiles of authors, interviews and letters...
BLAST and
vorticismVorticism was a short lived British art movement of the early 20th century. It is considered to be the only significant British movement of the early 20th century but lasted fewer than three years.-Origins:...
.
Hulme's politics were conservative, and he moved further to the right after 1911 as a result of contact with
Pierre LasserrePierre Lasserre was a French literary critic, journalist and essayist. He became Director of the École des Hautes-Études.He was an agrégé in philosophy, contemporary with Henri Vaugeois and Louis Dimier. As a young man he was a strong nationalist and anti-Dreyfusard...
, who was associated with
Action FrançaiseThe Action Française is a French Monarchist counter-revolutionary movement and periodical founded by Maurice Pujo and Henri Vaugeois and whose principal ideologist was Charles Maurras...
.
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
OostduinkerkeOostduinkerke is a popular seaside resort in the Belgian province of West Flanders. The name Oostduinkerke can be translated as 'Eastern Church of the Dunes'.Oostduinkerke is part of Koksijde, which also includes St-Idesbald and Wulpen....
near
NieuwpoortNieuwpoort is a municipality located in Flanders, one of the three regions of Belgium, and in the Flemish province of West Flanders. The municipality comprises the city of Nieuwpoort proper and the towns of Ramskapelle and Sint-Joris. On January 1 2008 Nieuwpoort had a total population of 11,062...
, in
West FlandersWest Flanders is the westernmost province of the Flemish Region, also named Flanders, in Belgium. It borders on the Netherlands, the Flemish province of East Flanders and the Walloon province of Hainaut in Belgium, on France, and the North Sea. Its capital is Bruges...
.
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
Sir Herbert Edward Read, DSO, MC was an English anarchist poet, and critic of literature and art. He was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of existentialism, and was strongly influenced by proto-existentialist thinker Max Stirner.-Early life:He was born in Kirkbymoorside in North...
- Notes on Language and Style (1929)
- T. E. Hulme, The collected writings (1996, OUP) edited by Karen Csengeri
- Selected writings (2003, Fyfield Books)