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T E HULME AND 'NEO-CLASSICAL MODERNISM'

hulme.gif (26424 bytes) AT the heart of the English avant-garde of the early 20th century, and exercising an important influence on Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and T S Eliot, was a neo-classical concept of modernism. This concept was the work of the English critic and philosopher, T E Hulme, the founder with Pound of Imagist poetry, and the translator into English of Sorel's Reflections on Violence.

Thomas Ernest Hulme was born in Staffordshire in 1883. A robust individual, he was sent down from Cambridge for rowdy behaviour (1904), and later worked his passage to Canada (1906) where he laboured on farms and in lumber-camps.

Hulme was killed during the First World War and Speculations, his major work, was not published until 1926. Constructed from notes and drafts by Herbert Read, it advocated and prophecied a hard-edged geometric art in opposition to the Romantic formlessness of Impressionism.

Hulme saw this art as classical and hieratic. For Hulme, Classicism was opposed to the Rationalism of the Enlightenment, a position shared - from a very different perspective - by Ayn Rand. Hulme had studied under Bergson, but the main influence upon him had been Wilhelm Worringer.

Hulme, T E Speculations (1926)
Jones, Alun The Life and Opinions of T E Hulme (1960)
Roberts, Michael T E Hulme (Carcanet New Press Ltd, 1982)

Last revised: 19 October 1995