Ferguson Robert - The short sharp life of T.E. Hulme

Introducing himself to an audience of London poetry lovers at a lecture in 1908 T. E. Hulme gave them clear notice of what to expect: I have not a catholic taste, he announced, but a violently personal and prejudiced one. I have no reverence for tradition. Hulme was is always trenchantly, conversationally quotable. That loose, speaking style is one of his great attractions. I recall, too, how well I savoured the contrast between the anti-romantic nature of his thought and the romantic nature of his personal fate: an early death fighting for his country in the Great War; the entirely posthumous fame based on a tiny legacy of philosophical and critical essays and The Complete Poetical Works, five short poems of a striking austerity and beauty. With Rimbaud he shared the distinction of having rejected, at an early age, the adored art of poetry. Reading Alun Joness biography of Hulme, with its anecdotes of curious and unusual behaviour, only increased my fascination.

But young men are easily fascinated: in the larger scheme of things, was there any substance to Hulme? Does he matter? The answer is, yes, he does. He was one of the half-dozen midwives of the Modernist aesthetic in poetry that was dominant for much of the twentieth century, and his influence on the young Ezra Pound, by personal acquaintance, and on T. S. Eliot, through his writings, has ensured that Hulmes name is never absent from discussions of the development of modern poetry. Like almost everything else he wrote, it was interesting, definite and provocative.

Remarkably, in view of his reputation and influence on twentieth-century British and American culture, at the time of his death Hulme had published no book and his name was unknown except to a small circle of artists and intellectuals in London and to readers of the cultural and literary weekly TheNewAge, with which he was associated as a writer. In 1920 his friend Ethel Kibblewhite handed over a mass of his papers and manuscripts to the critic and writer Janko Lavrin, who passed them on to A. R. Orage, editor of TheNewAge. Orage was convinced that, with good editing, something of value could be salvaged from the rick of papers. His first approach was to the poet F. S. Flint, who declined the task. Orage then offered it to his 27-year-old protg Herbert Read, the poet and critic, who had been an avid reader of TheNewAge since his student days in Leeds, and an admirer of Hulmes contributions to the paper in particular. Read accepted, and between 1920 and 1922 fragments of Hulmes poetry, aphorisms and writings on the French philosopher Henri Bergson appeared in the pages of the magazine. At some point the idea occurred of having a selection of essays and fragments published in book form, and Read wrote to offer the idea to C. K. Ogden, editor of the InternationalLibraryofPsychology,PhilosophyandScientificMethod, explaining that he had no interest whatsoever in seeing them published beyond the desire to see work that is, to say the least, provocative and vigorous, saved from complete oblivion.

Speculations:EssaysonHumanismandthePhilosophyofArt duly appeared in 1924. It consisted of Humanism and the Religious Attitude ; Modern Art and Its Philosophy; Romanticism and Classicism; Bergsons Theory of Art; The Philosophy of Intensive Manifolds; Cinders, a collection of aphorisms and penses; and an Appendix consisting of Hulmes introduction to Sorels ReflectionsonViolence; his Plan for a Book on Modern Theories of Art; and the five short poems gathered as The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme.

The few reviews it attracted on publication showed what would become a characteristic split in responses to Hulmes writing, between those such as H. C. Minchin in the SundayTimes who found it hard to hide their distaste for the views expressed and the manner in which they were expressed, and those such as the anonymous reviewer in the TimesLiterarySupplement who savoured the writers rare gift for forcing people to dissent from him. Speculations did not sell well, but it was nevertheless the volume that created and sustained Hulmes reputation in the interwar years and it became essential reading matter for young British intellectuals of the period.

One of its most enthusiastic readers was the poet Michael Roberts, who in 1938 wrote the first full-length study of Hulmes thought;

Speculations also fascinated postwar intellectuals in the anti-revolutionary 1950s. The Marxist critic Raymond Williams devoted a section of the Interregnum chapter in