Romanticism
and Classicism—T. E. Hulme
Explanatory notes—S. Sreekumar
T. E. Hulme [Thomas Ernest Hulme (1883-1917)] was a poet and critic
who had a notable influence on modernism. He was an aesthetic philosopher and
is called the 'father of imagism'. Hulme
was greatly influenced by Henri Bergson1, the French Philosopher.
The imagists and other avant-garde poets
of the period strongly reacted against the vacuity ( blankness) of
late- Victorian poetry2. Hulme was in the forefront of the reaction against
the Victorians. As the secretary of the Poets' Club he got the chance to meet
poets like Ezra Pound. Hulme published only 25 poems totaling some 260 lines,
but his poems like ‘Autumn’ and ‘City Sunset’ have the distinction of being the
first Imagist poems.
