Hulme, T(homas) E(rnest) 1883-1917
English critic, poet and philosopher

Born in Endon, Staffordshire, he was educated at Newcastle under Lyme High School and sent down from St John's College, Cambridge, for brawling. After a stay in Canada he taught in Brussels and developed an interest in philosophy. He joined Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and Jacob Epstein as a champion of modern abstract art, of the poetic movement known as 'Imagism' (his own small number of surviving poems are in that style) and of the anti-liberal political writings of Georges Sorel, which he translated. Killed in action in France, he left a massive collection of notes, edited by his friend Herbert Read under the titles Speculation (1924) and More Speculation (1956), which expose philistinism and attack what he considered to be weak and outworn liberalism. Most of his poetry appeared in The New Age in 1912. He was described by T S Eliot as 'classical, reactionary and revolutionary'.

Bibliography: M Roberts, T. E. Hulme (1982)