author
T. E. (Thomas Ernest) Hulme
1883–1917
A key early voice in modernism, he helped shape Imagism with short, exact poems and sharp criticism. His work was small in volume but lasting in influence, linking poetry, aesthetics, and ideas about art.
1 Audiobook
Canzoni & Ripostes Whereto are appended the Complete Poetical Works of T.E. Hulme
by Ezra Pound, T. E. (Thomas Ernest) Hulme
About the author
Born in Staffordshire in 1883, T. E. Hulme became an English poet, critic, and thinker whose ideas mattered far beyond the handful of poems he published. He studied at St John's College, Cambridge, but left without a degree, and later became an active presence in London's literary world.
Hulme is often remembered as an important early force behind Imagism. He argued for clear, hard, concrete language instead of vague poetic sentiment, and that preference helped open the way for modernist poetry in English. Alongside his literary criticism, he also wrote about art and philosophy, giving him a reputation as a compact but powerful influence on writers of the early 20th century.
His life was cut short during the First World War: he served in the British Army and was killed in 1917 in Flanders, Belgium, just after his thirty-fourth birthday. Though his body of work is brief, readers still return to him for the precision of his poems and for the force of his ideas.