T.E. Hulme: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings About Him

T.E. HULME: AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WRITINGS ABOUT HIM By K. E. Csengeri (University of Toledo) This bibliography lists 340 books, articles, broadcasts, dissertations, and published letters about or containing significant references to, the early modernist poet, critic and philosopher, T.E. Hulme (1883-1917). The items are listed in chronological order, beginning with a letter published in the London New Age of 1909 when Hulme was 26, and concluding with an article published in 1984: a period of seventy-five years in which he has intrigued and sometimes puzzled critics. Generally speaking the items fall into three main chronological groups: (1) early controversies that Hulme was involved in while still alive; (2) the beginnings of a posthumous interest in him, both critical and biographical, in the 1920s and 1930s; and (3) a growing academic interest from the 1940s to the present. Hulme's reputation rests on a single book, Speculations, which was published in 1924, seven years after its author was killed in Belgium in the First World War. A second collection, Further Speculations, came out in 1955. Yet, with only this small amount of printed matter to his credit, Hulme remains what Miriam Hansen called him, in an article in ELH in 1980: "an active, irritating element." As the man who preceded his friend Ezra Pound in Imagist theory, who helped to introduce Henri Bergson's philosophy into England and America, who was one of the first of the English critics to write about Jacob Epstein and the Vorticists when modern art was still new, and who helped to form T.S. Eliot's ideas about classicism and Original Sin, Hulme is a gritty presence that demands to be dealt with in any history of early modernism. This bibliography not only documents Hulme's reputation through the years but reveals something of the concerns of literary critics over the same period. 1909 Bax, E. Belfort. "Bergson and Bax," New Age, 5 (8 July 1909), 226. [Letter in answer to TEH's New Age article of July 1st. Claims that in The Problem of Reality published in 1891 or 1892, he said things that Bergson did not say until L'Evolution Créatrice (1907).] Flint, F.S. "Belated Romanticism," New Age, 4 (25 Feb 1909), 371. [Letter in answer to TEH (New Age, Feb 18), continuing their argument over the Poets' Club; thinks they are more concerned with dress than with poetry.] Flint, F.S. "Book of the Week. Recent Verse," New Age, 4 (11 Feb 1909), 32728 . [Rev. of the Poet's Club anthology, For Christmas MDCCCCVIII, with two poems by TEH. Criticizes the Club in general, but includes TEH's "quaint conceit or 'Autumn'" among those poesm "worthy of note."] 388 Talbot, R.W. "La Foi," New Age, 6 (4 Nov 1909), 20-22. [Rejoinder to TEH's letter (New Age, Oct 28).] 1910 "A Philosophy of Freedom," TLS, 22 Sept 1910, p. 336. [Rev. of Bergson's Time and Free Will, trans. F.L. Pogson. Remarks on the "formidable list" of works by and about Bergson in Pogson's bibliography. Although TEH is not mentioned by name, he originally compiled the list and gave it to Pogson.] 1911 Oxon, M.B. "Notes on Bergson," New Age, 10 (14 Dec 1911), 167. [Letter disagreeing with TEH's version of the parable of the barber.] Simmons, Horace C. "Bergsonism," New Age, 10 (16 Nov 1911), 71. [Letter in answer to TEH (New Age, Nov 9): "a philosopher named Aristotle, having considered the matter, in whatever language he wrote, denied that everything changed and moved. . . . For T.E.H.,' however, 'if reality is a becoming, things 'certainly' do not exist."] 1912 Books Pound, Ezra. Ripostes. London: Stephen Swift, 1912. [Includes the "Complete Poetical Works of T.E. Hulme." In his "Prefatory Note," Pound calls Les Imagistes "the descendants of the forgotten school of 1909."] Articles [Advertisement for TEH's translation of Bergson's An Introduction to Metaphysics], New York Times Review of Books, 10 Nov 1912, p. 658. [Described as the only authorized edition. TEH's name is misspelled as Huhne.] "Bergson's Philosophy," Boston Evening Transcript, 4 Dec 1912, p. 25. [Rev. of An Introduction to Metaphysics...