Thomas Ernest Hulme (September 16 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, exerted a notable influence on London modernism. He is famously quoted on Romanticism as 'spilt religion'.

He is known also as a poet, but wrote little: The Complete Poetical Works of T.E. Hulme was published in The New Age in 1912, at which point it consisted of five poems. He does have the claim to have been the original Imagist poet; and to have formulated with clarity the manifesto. This had a direct effect on Ezra Pound. T. S. Eliot he influenced through his critical writings.

Hulme also had a major impact on Wyndham Lewis (quite literally, in terms of their competition for Kate Lechmere ). In art he championed Jacob Epstein, and David Bomberg, and was a friend of Gaudier-Brzeska, as well as being in at the birth of Lewis's BLAST and vorticism.

He was born at Gratton Hall, Endon, in Staffordshire. He was educated at Newcastle-under-Lyme High School and St John's College, Cambridge from 1902; he read mathematics, but was sent down in 1904 (after Boat Race night and rowdyism — he was thrown out of Cambridge another time in a scandal involving a Roedean girl).

He tried to pick up the threads of his studies at University College, London. He then travelled to Canada, roughing it. He also spent time in Brussels, acquiring languages.

From about 1907 he was interested in philosophy, translating Henri Bergson, and sitting in on lectures in Cambridge. He also translated Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence. The most important influence on his thought appears to have been Wilhelm Worringer (1881-1965), German art historian and critic; and in particular his Abstraktion und Einfühlung (Abstraction and Empathy, 1908). These he synthesised somehow with his own muscular (he was beefy) proto-modernism and intense combativeness.

Hulme also at this time developed an interest in poetry, not sustained longer than a few years in fact. He was made secretary of The Poets' Club, formal and attended by establishment figures (Edmund Gosse and Henry Newbolt); here he encountered Pound, and F. S. Flint, a poetic follower. His extremely robust, and in many ways indefensible, approach to life did combine with a more outgoing nature than some.

His politics were conservative, and he moved towards a far-right position. He had contact in 1911 with Pierre Lasserre , associated with L'Action Française. This can be seen as presaging the 'tough-minded' attitudes that would permanently mar the reputations of Lewis and Pound.

Hulme volunteered as an artilleryman in 1914, and served in the British Army in France. He kept up his writing for The New Age, with 'War Notes', written as "North Staffs", and 'A Notebook' containing some of his most organised critical writing. He was wounded in 1916. Back at the front in 1917 he was killed by enemy fire in Nieuport, Belgium.

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)

Reference

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