author
Thomas Hulme
A key early voice of modernism, this English poet and critic helped shape Imagism and pushed for a sharper, more disciplined kind of writing. Though his own poems are few, his ideas had a lasting effect on 20th-century literature.
1 Audiobook
Hulme's Journal, 1818-19; Flower's Letters from Lexington and the Illinois, 1819; Flower's Letters from the Illinois, 1820-21; and Woods's Two Years' Residence, 1820-21
by Thomas Hulme, Richard Flower, John Woods
About the author
Born in Staffordshire in 1883, T. E. Hulme was an English poet, critic, and thinker whose work became highly influential in the years before the First World War. He studied at Cambridge, spent time in London literary circles, and became known for arguing against the emotional excess he associated with Romanticism.
Hulme is often linked with the beginnings of Imagism, a movement that favored clear language, precise images, and compressed expression. Even though he left behind only a small body of poetry, his essays on art, literature, and politics were widely read and helped shape the direction of modernist writing.
During the war he served in the British armed forces and was killed in action in 1917 at the age of 34. His life was short, but his influence reached far beyond it, especially through the writers and critics who took up his call for clarity, restraint, and fresh ways of seeing.