Remembering Hulme: A Neglected Philosopher-Critic-Poet

Abstract

I. centenary of T. E. Hulme, born on September 16, 1983, has passed with surprising silence. I have scanned the notices of literary and aesthetic journals and have not found any conferences or publications to commemorate this event and remember the poet-critic-philosopher who not long ago held center stage as a still influential father of modernism and the New Criticism. Indeed, in the late thirties, Hulme's reputation was so great that a reviewer in Scrutiny wrote of The T. E. Hulme Myth and felt the need to debunk it and minimize the importance and intrinsic interest of his ideas.' Interestingly, during Hulme's brief life, cut short by death in battle in 1917, he had comparatively little fame or influence;2 and now, after about four decades of posthumous fame (initiated by Herbert Read's publication of Hulme's Speculations in 1924),3 Hulme seems destined to sink back into oblivion, to be vaguely remembered merely as an influence on Eliot, Pound, and the Imagists. I come neither to bury Hulme nor to praise him but primarily to remember him. In doing this, I hope to correct some of the recent misinterpretations of his philosophy of literature, which perhaps have helped make him seem less interesting and memorable; and I would also like to point out the virtually unrecognized close connections of his thought with that of Moore and Russell, and thereby suggest that Hulme is philosophically something other and more than the mere Bergsonian propagandist he is typically portrayed to be. Finally, having corrected these errors of commission and omission in the interpretation of Hulme's thought, I shall go on to maintain that some of his central philosophical ideas and insights, which have been largely overlooked and neglected, are at the forefront of philosophical developments today. Therefore, before condemning Hulme to oblivion, we should recognize that he can be