From mud and cinders

This commentary looks at Thomas Ernest Hulme, his poetry, his life with particular focus on the First World War. His war prose is treated as if it were too topical to reverberate beyond its moment, despite the fact that Hulme shows himself to be not just a fine soldier, but also one of the most politically, philosophically and economically literate correspondents from the front. Hulme's conservatism has often been subsumed into the noisier simplifications of the reactionary Right, while his opposition to pacifism sits ill with the way we as a culture prefer to imagine and remember our war writers. He was killed in 1917 in Belgium, from a direct hit by a shell. Before he enlisted in 1914, Hulme had a reputation as a critic and thinker, Imagist poet, enemy of all things "Romantic", champion of contemporary art, Bergsonian and theorist of a new "classicism". His letters from the trenches have an unrivalled documentary value, as well as bearing moving witness to the alternation of a soldier's life between boredom and mortal danger, solitude and companionship. What is interesting about Hulme is that he was probably one of the few artistically minded men who went to war and found confirmation rather than the destruction of all they believed to be true. Hulme's ability to think chasmically is quite remarkable among the literary intellectuals of his time, as is his refusal to slide into idealism or nationalist chauvinism. He did not live long enough to write the many books and essays he had planned, and which occupied his mind as he fought. But from his brief, curtailed career, we can see a world view, perhaps even a complete one, even if that completeness is predicated on senselessness and brokenness. (Quotes from original text)