LITERATURE AND HUMANITIES

T. E. HULME

Speaker Paul Edwards, Bath Spa Univ. Coll. on 19 December 1998

Thomas Ernest Hulme was born in 1883, at Gratton. Hall, Endon, NorthStafforrdshire. He was educated at St. John"s College, Cambridge, but in 1904 he was sent down with other undergraduates for indulging in a brawl. In 1905, he went to Canada, then Brussels where he taught English and learned French and German, and to Italy. In 1912 he was readmitted at
Cambridge, largely trough the intervention of Henri Bergson, the well-known French philosopher, who said in his letter of recommendation "...He brings to the study of philosophy rare qualities of finesse, of vigour and insight. If I am not much mistaken he is destined to produce interesting and important works in philosophy in general, and in particular in the philosophy of art". Hulme’s university career was never completed - he left Cambridge shortly after his return and proceeded to Berlin, staying there for nine months and acquiring a wide knowledge of German philosophy and psychology.
With the war, he went to France in 1914 and was killed in Belgium in 1917, at age 34.
In 1913, he had published a translation of Bergson’s “Introduction to Metaphysics” and in 1916, a translation of Sorel’s “Reflections on Violence” . In addition, his published work include the “Complete Poetical Works of T.E. Hulme” consisting of five poems printed in 1915 as an addendum to Ezra Pound’s “Ripostes”, and a number of article contributed to periodicals. He left behind a great mass of articles, from which a number have been selected and edited by Herbert Read as “Speculations”, a book published in 1924. His philosophy was influenced by Nietzche, Bergson and Sorel. According to Read, “if Hulme had one foe exposed before all others to his constant invective, it was obscurantism. He was not, by design, a systematic thinker. He was in one sense, at least, a poet; he prefered to see things in the emotional light of metaphor rather than to reach reality through scientific analysis. His significance is none the less real - he knew very certainly that we were at the end af a way of thought that had prevailed for four hundred years; in this, and in his premonition of a more absolute philosophy of life, he had advanced the ideals of a new generation”. His views on modern art have had great influence on the ‘modern movement’.
Victor Suchar