It all began at hip London café called where one of the founders of modern poetry began setting his place in poetic history. T.E. Hulme was part of the poetry group known as the “School of Images”. Although he only published six works of poetry before his death- called the Complete Poetical Works- Hulme and his fellow poets, like F.S. Flint, and Edward Storer, rebelled against the set themes, rhythms and meters of the Romantic era and created poetry based off day-to-to images at the start of the twentieth- century.
Thomas Ernest Hulme was born on September 16, 1883 to a wealthy household in Endon, Staffordshire England. At an early age he took much interest in questioning and rebelling society around him. He attended St. Johns College, at Cambridge where he first studied Mathematics but did not finish because he was thrown out not once, but twice for multiple occasions of outlandish behavior. Hulme was quite a character who enjoyed heckling actors on stage at plays and kept a set of brass knuckle duster near him at all times for leisurely or emergency use. Many of Hulme’s close friends and colleagues say “his charm was his straightforwardness”, as said in the British publication of the Guardian. After being thrown of St. Johns he began attending the University College of London where he took up philosophy and later he worked and studied in Canada and Brussels.
While teaching in Brussels around 1907, Hulme’s became closely familiar with contemporary works of French philosophy and poetry. One in particular whom he met and developed a close relationship with was Henri Bergson. It was he who influenced Hulme’s deep interest and inspection of nineteenth- century French psychologists, which led to the development of his idea of “imagist theory and thought” as labeled in an article from the Poetry Foundation. Accompanying Hulme in his deep interest in French philosophy to create a literary movement was his disdain for Romanticism. In several instances he expresses his whole hate for it in saying that, “romanticism is dead in reality” or in his definition of romanticism and the movement that came before it classicism:
"Here is the root of all romanticism: that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of possibilities; and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order then these possibilities will have a chance and you will get progress." Classicism is precisely the opposite: "Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organization that anything decent can be got out of him."
Hulme believed that image, “was the untouched material of experience”, and the analysis of the works of his mentor Henri Bergson further set Hulme in his new way of understanding art imagery. Bergson specialized in the forms of awareness in which he believed there were only two different types: awareness is intuition and awareness is based in intellect which applies its knowledge to action. In 1913 a translation of Bergson’s book by Hulme Introduction to Metaphysics was released.
Hulme was inspired by another French great, poet Gustave Kahn who resisted following strict modes of poetry that included writing with exact rhythms, meters, and rhymes, but instead letting the authors thoughts wander freely. In 1908 Hulme returned to England , where he established the Poets Club he and other philosophers and poets convened to discuss and debate ideas of image and modern poetry. But this group soon faded when in 1909 the Poets Club was discontinued and the Café Tour D’Eiffel group began. It was in this group where Hulme is now accredited with influencing great American poet Ezra Pound and later T.S. Eliot.
Robert Ferguson the author of the book The Short Sharp Life of T.E. Hulme summarizes Hulme’s writing style as, “overhearing someone in the process of thinking”. Hulme set out to revolutionize an entire era of thinking and writing and depending on how you view the world , he succeeded. In August 1914 , Hulme entered the military where he served with the Royal Marine Artillery in France and Belgium. He was killed on the frontlines in at the age of thirty-four in1917, but his ideas, thoughts, and works still credit him with creation of modern poetry.
Sources
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/t-e-hulme
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/dec/08/biography.poetry
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/25/hulme-modern-poetry-ezra-pound-imagists
http://www.jrank.org/literature/pages/4499/T-E-Hulme-%28Thomas-Ernest-Hulme%29.html
No comments:
Post a Comment