Hulme, T. E.

T.E. Hulme, in full Thomas Ernest Hulme, (born September 16, 1883, Endon, Staffordshire, England—died September 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 Georges 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.