T.E. Hulme and Modernism 9781472543950, 9781441156655

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Acknowledgements I am grateful to many friends and colleagues in the Department of English and Drama at Loughborough University for their support and conversation while I was writing this book. Particular mention must go to Elaine Hobby, my Head of Department, and Nick Freeman, whose advice is always profoundly valuable and insightful. Those who took part in the conference ‘The Critic as Artist / The Artist as Critic’ at Lancaster University in June 2009 helped to sow the seeds for this book, and in this connection I must record a debt of gratitude, as ever, to John Schad, avatar of critical-creative writing and mentor extraordinaire. Also worthy of note were those with whom I discussed creative writing and literary criticism at the ‘Great Writing’ conference at Imperial College London in June 2012, especially those who attended, and commented on, my presentation at the conference. A special note of thanks must go to David Avital and Laura Murray at Bloomsbury, and to the two readers who commented on an earlier draft of the book you now hold. Finally, my thanks go to my parents, Carole and Philip; my brother, Matthew; and to Rachel Adcock, for support, encouragement, and indulging my quirkier moments while I finished this book.

Introduction

In January 1912, the New Age magazine published ‘The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme’ (Hulme 1912, 307). This sturdy-sounding volume comprised just five short poems (although a sixth was added later). T. E. Hulme had given up writing poetry two years earlier. In terms of literary fecundity he was undoubtedly meagre, with his small output making T. S. Eliot’s poetic oeuvre look positively prolific. Eliot himself described Hulme in 1917 as ‘the author of two or three of the most beautiful short poems in the language’ (Eliot 1924, 231). Does the word ‘short’ there give Hulme short shrift? After all, how many great short poems – that are comparable with Hulme’s in length, with barely a handful making it into double figures in their number of lines – are there in the language? But then for much of the last 100 years, Hulme’s poetry has been overshadowed by his critical and philosophical writing. Rebecca Beasley has recently framed it: ‘Though Eliot considered him “a really great poet”, his significance as a writer rests less on his poetic achievement than on his reputation as the inspiration behind the imagist movement’ (Beasley 2007, 37). Yet perhaps the theory and the poetry need to be considered side-by-side. Matthew Gibson has recently shone considerable light on the inconsistencies and internal contradictions within Hulme’s thought, particularly in his use of both Henri Bergson and William James, two thinkers whose ideas are at odds with one another in several key aspects, particularly in their differing views on romanticism (Gibson 2011). Yet such contradictions as are found in Hulme’s theoretical writing are also in his poetry; and the poetry has always been overshadowed by the theory. The poetry is a physical manifestation, or enactment, of the theory. Perhaps this moment, a 100 years after the ‘Complete Poetical Works’ appeared, is a good time to reconsider the poetry, especially in light of the growing attention given to critical-creative crossovers in theory and writing.1

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‘Hulme’s poems are more impressive than his theories’, J. B. Harmer argues in his study of imagism (Harmer 1975, 168). Michael Roberts, who was the first person to consider Hulme worthy of a book-length study, was of the opinion that ‘Hulme himself is far more of a poet than a philosopher [. .  .] But he is not wholly a poet, either’ (Roberts 1938, 214). A certain crossover or complementarity must be observed. Paul Edwards puts it best when he affirms that ‘the syntheses (or balanced antitheses) of ideas Hulme was looking for are best served through imagery rather than philosophical argument – at least as he developed it’ (Edwards 2006, 23). Indeed, ‘a simple division between poet and man of ideas is artificial’ (Edwards 2006, 24). Hulme the poet can shed light on Hulme the philosopher, Hulme the thinker, Hulme the art-critic, even Hulme the literary theorist. Similarly, J. B. Harmer has written that Hulme ‘has often been regarded as an original thinker’ but that ‘his originality lies in his poems; his prose writings are in large part the work of a brilliant middleman of ideas’ (Harmer 1975, 115). Yet it is Hulme’s often derivative prose ideas, rather than his strikingly original poetry, which has received much of the critical attention. The poetry deserves to be reassessed (some of it, even, assessed for the first time), not least because it would bring together a number of disparate strands of thought and expression that were beginning to emerge during the first few years of the twentieth century. Glenn Hughes has dubbed Hulme the ‘father of imagism’ (Hughes 1931, 9), and imagist poetry has in turn been called ‘the starting-point of modern poetry’, in T. S. Eliot’s phrase (Eliot 1965, 58). Hulme’s importance – and his possible influence – need to be reassessed, but with his poetry given more prominence. Moreover, Hulme arguably writes his best prose (in terms of both style and originality of thought) when he takes his cue from poetry rather than from formal criticism and philosophy. This book, then, is a somewhat bold reassessment of Hulme’s work, in seeking to place his poetry rather than his philosophical writings at the centre of his work, and in proposing that it is Hulme’s style, as much as his ideas, which form his truly original contribution to literature. In many ways, it might be viewed as an extended analysis of no more than the five poems which Hulme chose to publish during his lifetime, the ‘Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme’, with some of the posthumously published ‘satellite’ poems brought in alongside the prose works to show the crossovers and differences between Hulme’s various writings. A book-length analysis of such a small body of work

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may appear wilfully experimental, but this is partly because the poems repay close attention as among the earliest truly modernist poems in the English language. Such a bold experiment as this book presents might also be viewed as appropriate, given Hulme’s own experimental attitudes to poetry and the modes and forms in which he presents his ideas (notebooks, non-academic lectures, pugnacious reviews and works of art criticism). This book also seeks to argue that Hulme’s poetry keeps coming back to his other writing: his poetry becomes a lens through which we can view, or re-view, his critical and philosophical work. It is important to pay attention to all aspects of Hulme the writer, in order to assess – or reassess – his importance within modernism. As Frank Kermode put it in 1957: ‘It is true that the important things brought together in Hulme’s mind were available elsewhere; still, he brought them together, and people took note of the way he put them’ (Kermode 1966, 20–1). Kermode’s emphasis on style, on the how as much as the what, provides one reason for Hulme’s continued importance. The best place to begin is with an example from the poetry. Take a particularly controversial case: can eight words constitute a poem? Old houses were scaffolding once

and workmen whistling. (Hulme 2003, 13)

This short piece is taken from the fragments published posthumously in The New Age in 1921. Is this a poem? And if not, why not, if a haiku constitutes a poem? Poem or not, what the reader is presented with is a single thought expressed in a succinct way. It is ‘structured’, in the phrase Michael H. Whitworth uses to describe another of Hulme’s poems, ‘around a simple contrast of past and present’ (Whitworth 2010, 204). On the face of it Hulme uses very plain language, and it is true that there is nothing overly ornate or flowery about the words employed to describe the idea. The word ‘once’, placed at the end of the line and marking a kind of ending, puts us in touch with one of the oldest sentiments expressed in poetry: the poem is a sort of memento mori, as suggested by the word ‘Old’ in ‘Old houses’. If the houses are old then the men who built them are older; and they are unlikely still be to whistling, let alone working. To connect these houses with the past, in the next line the image is taken up by the image of the ‘workmen whistling’, and the alliterative sequence ‘were’, ‘once’, ‘workmen whistling’ provides the backbone to the poem. Both

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‘houses’ and ‘scaffolding’ provide a solid, physical structure for the fragment through being words used for literal structures. There is also the nice play of a noun with a participle, as ‘scaffolding’ (which looks as though it should be a verb but is not) chimes with ‘whistling’ (which is a verb but denotes an action already past, despite being a present participle). This enacts the play between past and present the poem is encapsulating: the present participle of ‘whistling’ is placed in the past by ‘were’. Similarly, ‘were’ chimes with ‘workmen’. ‘Old’ resurfaces within the ‘scaffolding’, and in doing so reminds us that the scaffolding is no longer there, although it once was in days of old. The present participles – the last one dangling suggestively like a man hanging off scaffolding – serve to go against one of Hulme’s most commonly quoted axioms, from his essay ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, his crystalline and static idea of poetry as ‘dry, hard, classical verse’ (Hulme 2003, 79). What should we make of that? Edwards sees this verse fragment as ‘a contrast between what is solid (and reliable) now  – the old houses that we imagine standing four-square and enduring – and its earlier non-existence except as space enclosed by scaffolding’ (Edwards 2006, 27). But if Hulme is simply suggesting a contrast between a solid structure and its previous precarious state of ‘non-existence’, why make the houses ‘old houses’? There is an emotional engagement summoned by the words – which Edwards acknowledges – but it is more complex than the relative simplicity of the eight words would immediately suggest. Thus the words also invite us as readers to think about where ‘reading’ a poem stops and ‘reading into’ it begins. In offering us a fragment, Hulme draws attention not to the idea of the poem as a whole entity, but to the individual words which make up this particular snapshot or single observation. With this comes the danger that we may end up reading too much into the simple statement we are being presented with; and yet Hulme encourages us to do this, by giving us a prosaic and simple statement in poetic form. He makes us see the image, and then forces us to ask: why write it down at all? If one of the perils of close reading is that we run the risk of reading things into a literary text which the author did not intend, then Hulme’s fragment wants us to address this danger, as his prose works make clear. The statement offered in this eight-word fragment verges on the prosaic – with its everyday setting and clear, simple language  – but there is also a suggestion of the poetic.

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This erosion of any straightforward boundary between prose and poetry is something which Hulme explores in both his poems and his essays, and he was perhaps the first writer to do this in both genres or forms. ‘Old houses were scaffolding once / and workmen whistling’: what is true of this short poem or fragment is that the images  – namely the houses, the scaffolding and the workmen – are all closely connected through the rhyme, syntax and general semantic association of the images. And ‘association’ is the key idea. Simon Brittan writes that when Hulme talks of the relation between form and intention, it becomes clear that he sees the search for poetic form not as a rigid metrical or lexical process, nor even as a wholly conscious intellectual exercise, but rather as a series of more or less free associations (more or less free because some associations may have been rejected by the poet during the writing process) based on a wholly personal set of aleatory conditions. (Brittan 2003, 187)

The poetry, as Hulme puts it himself in one of his essays, ‘writes itself ’ – at least, ‘in a sense’ (Hulme 2003, 54). And yet whether it was consciously or unconsciously done, when an association works, it is worth explaining why or how it works, not least because this question has important implications for modernist writing, and literary criticism, more generally. The publication of Speculations in 1924, seven years after Hulme’s death, acted as his First Folio, ‘rescuing [.  .  .] Hulme’s work from obscurity’ and bringing his ideas ‘if not to the modernist foreground, at least to its looming background’, to borrow Michael Levenson’s phrase (Levenson 1984, 38). But while Speculations included ‘The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme’, the five poems acting as a sort of verse-appendix or closing song following Hulme’s weightier essays, it also further consolidated the belief that Hulme’s poems were a minor afterthought. They may have been among his first published writings chronologically, but in printing the poems last rather than first, Herbert Read added to the misconception that it was for his prose writings, rather than his poetry, that Hulme was to be valued. Patrick McGuinness, in his volume of the Selected Writings, has in turn done his best to counter this impulse, first by printing the poems before the prose essays, and second by printing nearly all of Hulme’s poetic fragments alongside the poems. We can now gain a greater sense of Hulme the poet as well as Hulme the essayist and reviewer.

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T. E. Hulme and Modernism has three main aims, all of which might be viewed as attempts to address – indeed, redress – aspects of his work which have been underappreciated and under-analysed until now. The first aim is to bring Hulme’s poetry more fully into a discussion of his overall oeuvre; although he wrote only a few poems, they had a significant impact on Ezra Pound (and, as I will explore, possibly on T. S. Eliot as well) and show how his thoughts on modern poetry could be put into practice. They also act as a focal point for a new style of English poetry which was beginning to emerge at the time; unlike his contemporaries, Hulme explained the rationale behind the new modernist poetry written in free verse. The second aim, which springs from the first, is to challenge or question one of the commonest critical approaches to Hulme’s writing, which tends to view Hulme as an ‘ideas man’ rather than an innovative stylist of poetry and prose. In accordance with this reappraisal, then, I will explore Hulme’s style: the images his work uses, the rhetoric he employs and the ways in which he breaks with convention. The third aim is to suggest that Hulme’s influence and significance go beyond modernism, into the world of postmodernist literary criticism. Hulme was one of the first writers who attempted to fuse his creative and his critical work into a coherent unit, where one offered a supplement or enactment of the other, and this important development needs to be explored. Hulme once said that he was immediately up in arms if a book says a subject can be divided into three parts, so T. E. Hulme and Modernism is divided into four (Hulme 2003, 22). Each of the four chapters clusters around a particular hyphenation taken from Hulme’s poetry. I use these hyphenations because they represent Hulme’s writing in so many ways. His thinking is both joined and divided by the tensions between two competing and yet complementary forces: romanticism and classicism, poetry and prose, unification and fragmentation, creative and critical. The hyphen is a bridge which at once ‘joins and separates knowing and doing’, in the memorable phrase of Thomas Keenan (Keenan 1997, 147). Chapter 1, ‘Look-out Man’, considers Hulme’s theories, especially his rejection of romanticism in favour of classicism and the influence that his philosophical ideas had on his ideas about literature. Hulme’s argument, in essays such as ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ and ‘A Notebook’ (also published under the title ‘Humanism and the Religious Attitude’), is that romanticism and humanism make the mistake of believing that mankind contains infinite possibilities, whereas religion and classicism (with which Hulme is in

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sympathy) acknowledge that man is limited, flawed and held back, partly by the doctrine of original sin which is integral to Hulme’s concept of humanity. However, as I endeavour to show, the distinction Hulme sets up between these two opposing doctrines is not as clear-cut as he would like to have us believe. Chapter 2, ‘Star-eaten’, shows how the theories explored in the previous chapter are played out in the images of Hulme’s poems – images which, in fact, are often ‘of the romantic party without knowing it’ (to adapt William Blake). Chapter 3, ‘Noon-heat’, examines Hulme’s broader place within modernist thinking, and the ways in which his paradoxes and misunderstandings led to his creation of a particular philosophy which made his ‘modernist’ theory possible. Chapter 4, ‘Marking-time’, examines the ways in which Hulme’s emphasis on the ‘image’ paved the way for many of the most important developments in literary criticism during the twentieth century. In this chapter I also propose that Hulme’s writing, with its experimental and often fragmentary style, and its desire to erode the boundaries between the essay and the poem, has much to tell us about possible futures for academic writing, particularly literary criticism. This is a particularly timely discussion, given the emerging phenomenon of critical-creative writing in academia (‘critical-creative’ itself being a hyphenation which at once joins and separates). In this final chapter, the primary focus will be on Hulme’s notebook ‘essays’, ‘Cinders’ and ‘Notes on Language and Style’, as well as ‘A Notebook’. The afterword is divided into two: the first part suggests what Hulme can tell us about the criticism yet to come, the afterlife of theory, and the future of critical-creative writing. The second part is an attempt to bring together in innovative and experimental ways some of the overarching arguments of the book. The afterword endeavours to question the whole notion of a ‘genre’ of literary criticism; it is also intended to show how Hulme’s method of critical argument can be carried over into modern literary-critical discourse. This book seeks to re-examine Hulme’s work and its relation to modernism, paying particular attention to the poetry he wrote.2 This has always received far less critical attention than Hulme’s prose works; but this book follows C. H. Sisson, who spoke up so eloquently for Hulme in 1971 when he praised ‘The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme’: It would be a service if some publisher would give this tiny collection a little volume on its own. It would be of impressive weight for its size. The success of the word imagism has been such that it is generally taken that the interest of the poems is simply as illustrating this dead movement. On the contrary,

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the verse has intellectual and rhythmic qualities not found elsewhere in English verse. (Sisson 1981, 67)

To call for the publication of a single volume comprising just five short poems is to make an impassioned case for the value and achievement of the poet. We are still waiting for the standalone volume of Hulme’s poems, but this book is an attempt to show, as Sisson and others have started to do, why Hulme’s poetry is well-crafted, unique and significant for modernist literature. At each stage I will also endeavour to show why the poetry and the prose – namely, Hulme’s critical, theoretical and philosophical writings – are inseparable and complementary. Pound certainly maintained a strong belief in the striking quality and style of Hulme’s poems. He later said, ‘I came on six lines of Hulme’s the other day – no importance unless you think that it is important that a guy who left only a few pages of poetry should have a style so unmistakable that you come on it and know that it’s Hulme’s’ (quoted in Ferguson 2002, 60). Although the present study seeks to bring Hulme’s poetry closer to the centre of his thought – particularly the pre-1912 period of his ideas and writing – I will also touch upon his art criticism, not least because, as Ashley Dukes recalled, his and Hulme’s ‘general interest in “abstract” art led us especially to a revaluation of the images of poetry’ (Dukes 1942, 41): imagism, then, has a link with modernist art, and Hulme’s art criticism is therefore worth discussing alongside his slightly earlier writings on poetry. Hulme’s poetry is important because it is, in one sense, an epicentre of modernist thought, certainly of his modernist thought. Another articulate defender of Hulme the poet is Jewel Spears Brooker, who reminds us that Hulme’s writing was truly interdisciplinary in its scope, encompassing not merely the writing of poetry but theory about poetry, philosophy, art criticism and modernism in its more general sense: Through his own work and even more through the work of major poets such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound who learned from him, Hulme contributed immeasurably to poetry in the twentieth century. But he was more than one of the founding fathers of modern poetry; in all the arts, he was a prophet of and an advocate for modernism. Nothing was more important in the development of modern art than the consciousness, shared by major artists in all media in the decade before World War I, that a major dispensation in the history of art, a dispensation reaching back hundreds of years to the

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early Renaissance, was coming to an end; and that a new dispensation, with themselves as pioneers, was beginning. (Brooker 1994, 46)

It is not easy to know where to begin when assessing Hulme’s influence, not least because the issue of influence is one fraught with peril. Did Hulme influence T. S. Eliot? Did they ever meet? Was Pound being honest, or cagey, or forgetful, when he later dismissed Hulme’s influence on his own poetry? This book is not exclusively concerned with the longstanding attempt to trace, in definitive terms, Hulme’s influence on figures like Pound and Eliot, though inevitably the issue will arise at certain points; it is a difficult matter to resolve conclusively in many cases, and has been dealt with exhaustively elsewhere.3 The chief concern of this book is with, first, Hulme as a writer in his own right, and, second, the ways in which both his poetry and his prose writings can be related to broader modernist ideas explored by other writers and thinkers. Here the words of Edward P. Comentale and Andrzej Gasiorek are worth noting, from their introductory essay to the recent volume of essays on the subject: ‘Hulme’s particular brand of modernism offers a unique glimpse into the wider movement’s fundamental contradictions, its productive excesses and complicated hopes. But in making this claim we are striving neither to restore Hulme to canonical status nor to reconstruct a scholarly canon around a unified reading of Hulme’ (Comentale and Gasiorek 2006, 5). Such unified readings would misread the course of Hulme’s career, and neglect the ways in which his work developed over a busy ten-year period. Such an approach would also miss the many ways in which Hulme’s work exposes the internal paradoxes of modernist thinking. Hulme, as with other modernists, is concerned with contradiction and fragmentation, rather than unity and unification: even when striving for systems of unification, such as in ‘Cinders’, his work acknowledges the inescapable reality of the world as one of fragments and chaos. If this points to a paradox or inconsistency in Hulme’s work, then this is only to acknowledge an oft-noted facet of his writing and thought. But there is more to the paradoxes in Hulme than this might suggest. It is my contention, which will be found running throughout this book, that although he sets himself up as a sort of structuralist – seeking to divide the world into rigidly defined and distinctly separated binary opposites  – Hulme in fact emerges as a sort of unwitting poststructuralist, anticipating Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction in his collapsible opposites which are often shown to bleed

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into one another, troubling and complicating any straightforward idea of ‘opposites’. Romanticism/classicism, language/thought, speech/writing (in poetry, specifically), and visual art/music are often presented in Hulme’s writings as distinctly separate entities; but if we analyse them a little more closely, they are haunted – in advance – by the spectres of postmodernism and deconstruction. Modernism, Hulme seems inadvertently to realize, is already postmodern. Leading out from this contention, another aim of this present study is to question the notion of literary ‘influence’ as working in any straightforwardly comprehensive or comprehensible manner. ‘Influence’, as its etymology attests, literally means inflowing, and shares a common origin with the word ‘flux’. Hulme is well aware of the extent to which real life is constantly in flux. Influences – as we usually understand the term – are constantly colliding with us, joining with our existing ideas and prejudices, shaping and reshaping our thought, forcing us to re-evaluate our perspective. There can be no clear line drawn between Hulme and modernism in terms of the question of influence and inheritance. Hulme’s own influences offer a perfect case in point of just how slippery a matter this question can be. As Elizabeth Kuhn has written of one particular example: Nietzsche’s influence on Hulme, as on others including D. H. Lawrence, is never fully traceable because it is at some remove, through other thinkers, or it is denied or protested against – [critic David S.] Thatcher shows how Hulme disregarded shifts in Nietzsche’s philosophy in order to cast him as a romantic and thus reject his influence. However, Hulme and Nietzsche are two thinkers who clearly share what we might productively call an affinity, as opposed to Thatcher’s privileged paradigm of ‘influence,’ and the affinity consists in their independently developed anti-humanist stances. (Kuhn 2011, 9)

Although we can be reasonably certain that Hulme read and admired aspects of Nietzsche’s work, Kuhn’s point is nevertheless worth bearing in mind.4 Here we might borrow and adapt a phrase from the realm of Darwinian natural selection: naturalists and evolutionary biologists talk of the phenomenon of convergent evolution, whereby creatures on different continents in very remote parts of the world have evolved along similar lines because particular creatures adapt to fill similar roles. What I propose in this study, then, is not

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a case for ‘influence’ but rather an analysis of what we might call parafluence; that is, a convergent evolution of ideas among contemporary like-minded thinkers and artists, which acknowledges the possibility of direct influence while at the same time remaining sceptical of any linear progression from one thinker to another. Parafluence retains the sense of a flowing of ideas conveyed by ‘influence’, while rejecting the idea of any straightforward and direct ‘input-output’ model for the origin and tracing of ideas. In applying instead the prefix para- to this root word, I wish to suggest that ideas  – including ideas about literary modernism  – are often disseminated and developed by different people who may not have direct knowledge of each other’s work, but who are nevertheless often finding similar ways of reacting to, and developing, the ideas of previous thinkers.5 They are, in other words, flowing down the same stream but independently of each other. Such is the case with Hulme and Nietzsche, but I wish to suggest that the principle of parafluence can be applied more widely than this to other areas of literature and the arts.6 This point about Hulme’s influence has been made before, by Sanford Schwartz: ‘His interest for us lies not in his influence but in his effort to find a thread that binds together early twentieth-century philosophy, Imagist poetry and the abstract art of the Cubists and Vorticists’ (Schwartz 1985, 52). Hulme is remarkable for his social connections within modernism and its related movements alone. If he had never written a word, his conversation, his friendships, his disagreements and his opinions would have made him a memorable figure within the artistic scene of the time. He was friends with Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis (the latter of whom he famously boxed with in Soho Square),7 championed the work of artists and thinkers like Jacob Epstein and Henri Bergson, disagreed with prominent intellectuals such as Bertrand Russell, and through everything he did he courted fame (or infamy) and attracted attention. Michael Roberts recounts a memorable story about a brazen Hulme urinating in the London streets: ‘Once he was making water in Soho Square in broad daylight when a policeman came up and said, “You can’t do that here.” Hulme turned around and buttoned himself, saying: “Do you know you are addressing a member of the middle classes?” The policeman said, “I beg pardon, sir”, and went on’ (Roberts 1938, 26). This Hulme is indistinguishable from Hulme the writer: provocative, shameless and out to court trouble and attention (on both occasions when he

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left Cambridge, he did so in a haze of scandal and notoriety). In 1938, Sir John Squire remembered Hulme: Large numbers of people – writers, painters, philosophers, patrons – used to assemble there and smoke and drink liqueurs; while Hulme, as massive as Johnson, but a non-smoker and a teetotaller, consumed sweets, argued with anybody who was willing to cope with him, or soliloquized on almost any theme, ancient or modern. Sometimes he talked great sense, sometimes great nonsense: when it was nonsense he was fully aware of the fact, but not all his listeners were. Always his talk was fluent, well-shaped, subtle, various in allusion, full of illuminating simile; he was combative, fiery-tempered, intolerant of those who crossed him, catholic otherwise in his taste in friends, an utter individualist in his habits, and afraid of nobody. (Squire 1938, 155–6)

Hulme’s style opened himself up to the dangers of parody, and several contributors to The New Age and other magazines rose to the occasion. In an essay on Jacob Epstein, he characteristically said of a critic with whom he disagreed: ‘The most appropriate means of dealing with him would be a little personal violence’ (Hulme 2003, 119). In January 1913, the following ‘epigram’ appeared in the magazine: Great Hulme! as you are known in the Poetry Shop, Hulme the Metaphysician! as runs your advertisement before your eyes, why had you no father beside you to frown you out of re-publishing your Complete Poetical Works? ’Twas no bad small jest to print them – once, in a miscellaneous column. Had you left them there, the world would not now be exclaiming – ‘Great Hulme! he never meant ’em as a joke.’ Your seriousness excuses you from a charge of impropriety, but you should be warned that such seriousness, if exhibited, mutatis mutandis, by an artisan among artisans, would get him entitled ‘– the Looney.’ And metaphysicians may prove equally indulgent to you. (T. K. L. 1913, 212)

It was signed simply ‘T. K. L.’, but in reality the author was Beatrice Hastings, a writer and socialite who made numerous pseudonymous contributions to The New Age. Although this ridicules Hulme as an unwitting jester who has made the mistake of taking himself seriously, it does remind us that Hulme was also taken seriously by others, and that Hulme was a poet as well as a man of ideas (even if, frequently, they were other people’s ideas, which he digested and repackaged).

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Another important concern is chronology. This was covered magnificently by Michael Levenson in his A Genealogy of Modernism, and showed  – as Speculations had failed to do – that Hulme’s views had developed and altered over time (see Levenson 1984, 37–47). His abandonment of Bergson around 1912, as he became more and more sympathetic to the far-right Action Française and the work of Pierre Lasserre, is one significant watershed. Another is his earlier abandonment of the writing of poetry (although he continued to write about it). Mary Ann Gillies summarizes Hulme’s three-phase career as a man of letters: ‘it is possible to discern three separate, but allied, phases in Hulme’s abbreviated career’: The first phase, which lasts from about 1908 to 1911–12, is notable for his devotion to Bergsonian philosophy. The second phase, which runs from about 1912 to 1914, is marked by his commitment to Classicism. The third phase, which extends from about 1914 until his death in 1917, is marked by an interest in religion and a markedly antihumanist stance. It is in the first phase that Hulme articulates an aesthetic that is centred on the primacy of the image in the poem, on the absolute importance of individuality in poetry, and on the precision and clarity of the language that accomplishes this. [. . .] After 1912 he turned to art criticism and wrote no more poetry or critical articles on literature. (Gillies 1996, 43)

This book is concerned with the first two phases of Hulme’s career, although his writing from the post-1914 phase will be drawn upon, albeit to a lesser extent, in order to illuminate the earlier writings, and to emphasize how Hulme’s thought changed and evolved over time. A young Herbert Read oversaw the publication of Speculations in 1924. Reviewing the volume in the Criterion, T. S. Eliot praised Hulme: ‘In this volume he appears as the forerunner of a new attitude of mind, which should be the twentieth century mind, if the twentieth century is to have a mind of its own’ (Eliot 1924, 231). A further volume of uncollected work, Further Speculations, appeared in 1955, edited by Sam Hynes. Hulme’s work has attracted attention from numerous critics over the last century since he appeared on the London literary scene, but there have been relatively few book-length studies of his work. The first, by Michael Roberts, appeared in 1938. Alun R. Jones’s 1960 biography, The Life and Opinions of T. E. Hulme, brought some more of Hulme’s writing to light, but it was not until 1994 that The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme appeared, edited by Karen Csengeri. A biography by Robert Ferguson, The Short

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Sharp Life of T. E. Hulme, appeared in 2002. In the last few years several studies of Hulme have appeared, the most prominent of which are Rebecca Beasley’s Theorists of Modernist Poetry: T. S. Eliot, T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound (2007) and a collection of essays, T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism (2006), edited by Edward P. Comentale and Andrzej Gasiorek. These last two works in particular, as their titles make clear, have examined the connections between Hulme and modernism, but the present book proposes two new additions to the debate: the crossovers between modernist writing and postmodernist literary criticism (treated principally in the fourth chapter), and the placing of Hulme’s poetry at the forefront of a consideration of his significance for modernism. Criticism of Hulme’s poetry has tended to be placed in the wider context of imagism, something the present study seeks to revaluate; there has been a tendency for the poetry itself to become lost in the attempt to show how Hulme influenced Pound in the latter’s founding of the imagist movement. J. B. Harmer’s Victory in Limbo: Imagism 1908–1917 (1975) escapes this, managing to do both, and Harmer has some very perceptive analyses of Hulme’s poetry. In 2008, Flemming Olsen’s Between Positivism and T. S. Eliot appeared, a discussion of Hulme’s relationship with imagism (Olsen 2008). However, Hulme’s poetic output has not previously been given such detailed and sustained attention as the present study. If Hulme’s poetry  – as well as his theoretical writing, such as his lectures and essays – played an important role in imagism, and if imagism has had an effect that can be felt in much of the poetry written since, then the critic is required to pay Hulme’s poetry the attention it deserves. Although minor in scope or scale, it is not minor in achievement. Hulme’s small poetic oeuvre still has things to tell us about the shape, the tone and the themes of modern poetry, not least because Hulme thought like a poet from start to finish, dealing in metaphors and images. As Herbert Read wrote in his introduction to Hulme’s Speculations: If Hulme had one foe exposed before all others to his consistent invective, it was obscurantism. He was not, by design, a systematic thinker. He was, in one sense at least, a poet: he preferred to see things in the emotional light of a metaphor rather than to reach reality through scientific analysis. His significance is none the less real; he knew very certainly that we were at the end of a way of thought that had prevailed for four hundred years; in this, and in his premonition of a more absolute philosophy of life, he had advanced the ideals of a new generation. (Read 1924, xv)

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An aesthetic The famous opening lines of T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ immediately present us with a surprising comparison or simile, where the evening sunset is likened to a ‘patient etherised upon a table’ (Eliot 1990, 13). Eliot wished to give readers something they had not seen before, and the analogy between the sunset and the anaesthetized patient succeeds because, although it is surprising, it is not without its associations and connections: because ‘ether’ is a word that can be applied to the sky as well as to anaesthetic, and because the word stems from a Greek term meaning to burn or shine, and that is what the evening sunset literally does. In summoning the image of anaesthetic, we might say, the poem forces us to rethink the aesthetic images we take for granted, to which we have become anaesthetized. Images of the evening sunset are usually so trite and familiar in poetry that they no longer successfully convey the majestic and numinous qualities of what they describe. New metaphors or similes must be found which will reinvigorate such time-honoured subjects in poetry. But at the same time there is also a suggestion that we must be wary of the very idea that transcendence is achievable in poetry: as Edward P. Comentale observes of Hulme’s poetic practice, ‘This poet is incapable of transcendence, of flying off into the ether’ (Comentale 2004, 113). These new poetic symbols and metaphors, then, must not only be original and striking, but also resistant to the infinite and transcendent. The sunset may be a vast, boundless and quasi-mystical in poetry, but in new poetry, Hulme argues, and Eliot shows, the sunset must

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be pulled back to within our reach. We must be wary of getting carried away when describing such natural phenomena as sunsets. All of this is sensed moving within the current of Eliot’s opening lines, unspoken but nevertheless perceived by us. This modernist preoccupation with the finite and definite, as opposed to the infiniteness that had preoccupied the Romantics, was seized upon and developed into a clear theoretical position by Hulme. He would later set out his ideas in an essay, ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, which was composed around 1912; but several years before this, he was exploring this idea of the finite and limited nature of humanity in a series of striking ‘imagist’ poems. And Hulme’s is a poetry that is firmly down-to-earth. Etherization, if possible, must be of the clinical kind Eliot calls into play; but in being deadened or numbed by the association with anaesthetic, Eliot’s simile brings the sunset flaring into new life. Such a reimagining of the sunset as Eliot achieves here shares something with Hulme’s sunset poems, where he writes disgustedly of the Sunset That spréad like a scarlet sore O’er hálf a sick sky. (Hulme 2003, 11)

The excessive alliteration – with ‘scarlet’ threatening to induce a scarlet fever summoned by ‘sick’, while also carrying the ‘scar’ suggested by ‘sóre’ – makes a surprising analogy, but also succeeds in making the speaker sound sickened and disgusted by the sunset. The message the poem conveys is clear enough: old images such as the sunset must be made new by poets; readers are sick of the traditional well-worn analogies. What is effective about Hulme’s lines is that they convey a new image, while also reminding us how sick and tired we had become with the old ones. In likening the sunset to a ‘scarlet sóre’, Hulme also put into practice something which he saw as one of the chief purposes of modern poetry: that of ‘recording impressions by visual images in distinct lines’ (Hulme 2003, 64). This is the idea which several imagist poets, including Ezra Pound, would take up in the wake of Hulme. It is also the idea that Eliot would use in the opening to ‘Prufrock’ quoted above. Imagism will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter, but here there is something else worth noting. In Hulme’s poetry, we are forced to think about the latent connections between the images

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presented to us, and these often run deeper than criticism of Hulme’s poetry has tended to acknowledge. Michael Roberts observed: In all Hulme’s poems, the ‘infinite’ things  – beauty, sky, moon and sea  – appear, but where a romantic poet would try to make familiar things seem important by comparing them with moon or sea, Hulme reverses the effect and makes the infinite things seem small and homely by comparing them with a red-faced farmer, or a child’s balloon, or a boy going home past the churchyard. (Roberts 1938, 228)

And while his poetry is concerned with balloons, bats, larks, clouds and other symbols of the sky and flight, there is always a firm coming-down-to-earth. The poetry is gravity-conscious. It is also – and this is another of Hulme’s most important ideas – aware of the flaws inherent in humanity, and opposes the optimistic romantic view that humanity is constantly improving, the idea that Hulme would develop a few years later in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’. The ‘scarlet sóre’ of the sunset brings this point home to us. The sunset, like mankind, is diseased, infected, sick – hardly the typically romantic view of it. But the word ‘romantic’ (lower case) requires some clarification, so it is worth turning to Hulme’s essays now to see what he means when he uses that term. Hulme arrived at this theory of poetry through a series of prose writings – lectures, notes and essays  – which he wrote during the years when he was writing poetry, as well as shortly after he had given up poetic composition himself. These prose writings, comprising essays and lectures, notebook scraps and short reviews, allow for some of the ideas already inherent in his slim body of poems to come more sharply into focus. These theories bring sharply into focus some of the principal tenets of the later imagist movement, with Ezra Pound initiating the ‘Imagistes’ in 1912. It is worth examining the interplay between Hulme’s critical or theoretical writings  – particularly the two works, ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’ and ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ – for an insight into how and why Hulme sees poetry as being at a watershed at this point in literary history, and what historical and philosophical support he offered for his theories. For underpinning these mission-statements which would become, in effect, mission-statements for much modernist poetry there is a deeper philosophical argument which would have profound implications for twentieth-century thought. Hulme did not originate this philosophy, but

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he borrowed and repackaged it, and in doing so brought to the attention of numerous poets of the period an important development in the world of literature and thought.

The well and the bucket Alongside this stylistic call for ‘recording visual impressions in distinct lines’, Hulme’s poetry is attempting a revolution of another, more socially based kind: a revolution of philosophy. ‘A reviewer writing in the Saturday Review last week spoke of poetry as the means by which the soul soared into higher regions, and as a means of expression by which it became merged into a higher kind of reality,’ Hulme wrote in ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’. ‘Well, that is the kind of statement that I utterly detest. I want to speak of verse in a plain way as I would of pigs: that is the only honest way’ (Hulme 2003, 59). Pigs, as the old cliché has it, cannot fly; this is why Hulme chooses them for the purposes of analogy. Once again we have a firm sense of coming back down to earth with a bump. Good modern poetry is rooted to the ground, and may only treat of higher things within strict limits. Such a lack of confidence in the powers of flight is seen in Eliot’s poem, too: in ‘Prufrock’ the ether is summoned, but the patient is ‘etherized upon a table’, pinned down to the earth, to the stable and concrete operating table on which he or she is spread. In being a ‘patient’, he/she is made flawed and suffering, and this idea, too, shares much with Hulme’s concept of modern art and philosophy. But what needs to be acknowledged is that Hulme’s reaction against the high-flying nature of earlier poetry  – particularly that which had been dominant throughout the nineteenth century, and continued to be so thanks to the Edwardian verse-makers – is rooted in one of his core philosophical ideas. This is the distinction between the romantic and classical attitude in art. By this stage, he had given up writing poetry, and had begun to move away from Bergsonism into what we might call his ‘classicist’ phase. In ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, he defines the two distinct approaches to art by reference to two images, the well and the bucket: Put shortly, there are two views, then. One, that man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstance; and the other that he is intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and religion to something fairly decent. To the one

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party man’s nature is like a well, to the other like a bucket. The view which regards man as a well, a reservoir full of possibilities, I call the romantic; the one which regards him as a very finite and fixed creature, I call the classical. (Hulme 2003, 70)

Man is fundamentally limited, Hulme argues, and should acknowledge and work within these necessary limitations. Since the Renaissance, there had been a tendency to exalt mankind above his proper rank, and this, for Hulme, was a symptom of romanticism too – a term which Hulme uses in a broader sense than the Romanticism of Wordsworth and Keats would suggest. Indeed, in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ he implies that Keats is often not ‘romantic’ in the sense which Hulme seeks to reject: The essence of poetry to most people is that it must lead them to a beyond of some kind. Verse strictly confined to the earthly and the definite (Keats is full of it) might seem to them to be excellent writing, excellent craftsmanship, but not poetry. So much has romanticism debauched us, that, without some form of vagueness, we deny the highest. (75–6)

Keats was of the classical party without knowing it. Hulme calls for a return to the classical model, which had dominated the world throughout the Middle Ages before the Renaissance, in which we acknowledge our flaws and limitations and see man (Hulme uses the male word, but he includes women in this as well) as a fixed creature. This idea of man’s limitations goes beyond the literary, then; it is a philosophical standpoint which Hulme supports in life and culture more generally, beyond the practice of writing poems. Such a view is at odds with the romantic attitude, but also with much poetry which was still being written during the early years of the twentieth century, when Hulme is formulating his ideas about poetry. Hulme conceives of modernism as largely a classical movement, drawing on a time before the Renaissance (though not seeking exactly to recapture such a time), poignantly aware of the limitations of humanity and imbued with a sense of order and control. ‘Poetry not for others, but for the poet’, he writes. ‘Nature infinite, but personality finite, rough, and incomplete’ (Hulme 2003, 53). This idea of the classical attitude is central to Hulme’s poetry, and shows that his adherence to ‘classical’ values predated his essay on romanticism and classicism. Indeed, his classical attitude can be placed alongside the earlier call

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for a stylistic formula comprising ‘juxtaposition in separate lines’ of different images (Hulme 2003, 64). The juxtaposition needs to be on separate lines for maximum impact, because it draws a line – literally, a verse line-break – between the two images being brought together, suggesting that they are simultaneously different and yet linked. This technique creates what Hulme calls a ‘visual chord’ (64). ‘A City Sunset’ represents another attempt to find the right image for the natural phenomenon of the impressionist and poetic symbol par excellence, the sunset: A frolic of crimson is the spreading glory of the sky, heaven’s jocund maid flaunting a trailed red robe along the fretted city roofs about the time of homeward going crowds – a vain maid, lingering, loth to go . . . (Hulme 2003, 1)

However, this early poem succeeds only partially in its aim, because it expends too many words in drawing the sunset-maid analogy; because if anything it is too free in its free verse, too liberated from the shackles of rhyme and metre; because ‘spreading glory’ sounds too expansive, too vague and traditionally romantic to suit Hulme’s limited vision of man; and finally, and certainly not least importantly, the central juxtaposition between the sunset and a ‘vain maid’ hides no deeper association (as we find with Eliot’s ‘etherised’ or Hulme’s ‘scarlet sóre’) than the superficial cover of the red robe. There is no real sense of man’s limitations here, and as a result Hulme only partially escapes the romanticism which he so vehemently deplores. Unlike Eliot’s etherized patient, Hulme did not draw a tighter link between his two images. (I will discuss the importance of Hulme’s images in more detail in the next chapter.) This idea of man’s fundamental limitations colours much of Hulme’s most famous poems. However, we might question to what extent Hulme’s poetry bears out his idea of classicism. There is ‘Mana Aboda’, a poem he drafted to fellow poet F. S. Flint on a postcard: Mana Aboda, whose bent form The sky in arched circle is, Seems ever for an unknown grief to mourn,

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Yet on a day I heard her cry: ‘I weary of the roses and the singing poets– Josephs all, not tall enough to try.’ (Hulme 2003, 2)

The poets are not tall enough to reach her not just because they are slaves to a worn-out poetic style, but because they are not divine (God, not Joseph, was the father of Jesus); similarly, the latent connection between the roses and the poets, played out in the word po(e)sy which does not appear in the poem but is in the air of the poem, makes the poets seem wilfully decorative, excessively ornate, rather than necessary and fundamental to existence. We are tired of the rose-tinted view of the world offered by poetry, Mana Aboda says; it must be reinvented. (Mana Aboda herself most probably refers to a Polynesian deity whose name Hulme may have encountered through Florence Farr.)1 The poem is one of Hulme’s most effective demonstrations of his central ‘classical’ theory of poetry and culture. But how classical is such a poem? What are we to make of the ‘unknown grief ’ for which Mana Aboda appears to mourn in the third line? Perhaps another example from Hulme’s poetry will help to clarify this issue of the romantic versus the classical. ‘Susan Ann and Immortality’ showcases this distinction even more clearly: Her head hung down Gazed at earth, fixedly keen, As the rabbit at the stoat Till the earth was sky, Sky that was green, And brown clouds past, Like chestnut leaves arching the ground. (Hulme 2003, 3)

Its eponymous focus is presumably a young girl who seeks to alter her perception of the world by turning her head upside-down and looking up at the sky, in an effort to see it from a new angle. The girl does this playfully, presumably with no real conscious philosophical aim. The poem employs plain, simple language and clear images in its seven lines. As with all of Hulme’s verses, it is poetry on a miniature scale, eschewing grand themes or scenes, and treating the trivial and the everyday. Yet there is clearly an acknowledgement of the numinous and the vast within the portrayal of this simple scene. Hulme also

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gives us a clear sense of his theory of juxtaposition of images in distinct lines of verse. As the poem’s title suggests, immortality – the realm of the romantic – is being summoned, but only in connection with the mortal figure of Susan Ann. Her gaze is likened to that of a rabbit: once again, a creature resolutely and fixedly limited to the earthy ground. The idea of the poem – that we need to turn things around – is shown to be something that we must effect ourselves: we cannot literally turn the world upside down till the sky is the earth and vice versa, so we must instead change our own position, so that we can perceive the world from a new perspective. Nature is vast and unconquerable, stronger and more powerful than ourselves, but from our earthbound vantage point we can nevertheless see it from a different perspective. Romantic poetry, Hulme would later maintain, attempts to do just that: to convince us that we can move the earth, that we have infinite possibilities latent within us. Susan Ann flings her head down between her legs and views the earth as the sky (‘Sky that was green’) and chestnut leaves as ‘brown clouds’. The sky ‘becomes’ earth and the earth sky. Susan Ann’s vision of the sky must be altered from her position on the ground, to which she is bound by gravity. For her, as for the rest of us, there will be no flying off into the ether. The poem may talk about turning the earth to sky, but the sound-pattern of down-brown-clouds-ground tells a different story: we will always end up grounded. All we can do is look up. Yet the association of leaves with clouds, and grass with sky, does pair the earthly and earthbound with the ethereal, the insubstantial, even the transcendent. The people who feature in Hulme’s poems appear to need the transcendent: their eyes are resolutely on the stars. ‘Till the earth was sky’, rather than merely like it: Hulme deals in metaphor, rather than mere simile, and in doing so he hints at a key aspect of modern poetry. Earth and sky are really physical symbols or images for, respectively, classical and romantic attitudes, but the former attitude does not rule out the latter from poetry altogether. Just as Eliot’s lines from ‘Prufrock’ a few years later would draw a connection between the vast sky and the sick patient, so Hulme paves the way for modern – and, specifically, modernist – poetry in showing how earth and sky, limited and limitless, can be discussed together in order to highlight the difference between limited man and limitless nature. Hulme’s affinity may lie with the earth rather than the sky, but he can still appreciate the sky from his grounded position. Yet he knows man will never leave the ground. It is perhaps

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worth noting that powered flight of heavier-than-air craft  – starting with the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk in 1903 – had only just been made possible when Hulme begins to develop his theories and write his poetry. For the first time, it is possible for man to live the dream of Icarus and take to the skies. But Hulme knows that this is an illusion, and we are still bound to the earth and the earthly. His poetry may not have gravitas but it has gravity. Hulme’s poetry encourages us to see the very concept of association anew, in order to understand how poetry can use it to make the reader see something as if for the first time. But the formula which he stressed for modern poetry involved pairing the traditional with the untraditional, the typical poetic trope with the atypical. ‘Thought is the joining together of new analogies, and so inspiration is a matter of an accidentally seen analogy or unlooked-for resemblance’, he writes in ‘Notes on Language and Style’ (44). But this practice of the visual chord, of recording visual images in distinct lines, is closely allied with the later development of his thought which would explore the romantic and classical attitudes to art. So we get the surprising associations between earth and sky, or between the sunset and a scarlet sore. But another point needs to be stressed. Hulme’s poetry highlights an association between two things, but rather than pairing an abstract concept with a physical object, he usually links the physical with the physical, or the tangible with the visible: the sunset with a red sore, or clouds with leaves. There is very little room for the abstract in Hulme’s verse. We can touch or see everything: everything is sensory, very little extrasensory. Even the ethereal, when it is summoned, has substance: a cloud, the stars, the moon, rather than talk of the heavens or the infinite. As he would write in ‘Notes on Language and Style’, ‘perhaps literary expression is from Real to Real with all the intermediate forms keeping their real value’ (38). This is the start of imagism, but it is imagism already with attitude, with a mission-statement. It is the start of modernist poetry, the sort of thing which Eliot would bring to a wider audience a few years later. Visualization is the key to Hulme’s poetry: one must be able to see the thing described. One cannot see abstractions. ‘What is the colour of jealousy?’ is a question without a proper answer, since one cannot see emotion; we may attribute the colour green to the emotion, but we do this only out of convention or allusion (the ‘green-eyed monster’ of Othello, for instance). But if Hulme’s poetry shies away from abstract concepts such as emotions, then how can modern poetry

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capture something emotional, when emotion is often such an important aspect of the poetic? Pound’s later axiom for imagism, ‘Go in fear of abstractions’ (quoted in Jones 1972, 131), was to develop Hulme’s idea; but imagist poetry did not, after all, reject emotion altogether. Imagism merely restrained excessive emotion, just as Hulme restrained humanity, keeping us grounded and down to earth. How to reconcile the theory with the practical result, the poetry itself? This is not a trivial point, and goes beyond Hulme’s own verse: Eliot stood by such a view, famously stating in his influential essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ that: ‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality’ (Eliot 1999, 21). How then to account for the emotional qualities of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, or The Waste Land? The answer lies partly in Hulme’s indebtedness to Bergson. His essay on classicism came at the end of his Bergsonian phase, but when he was composing poems his enthusiasm for the French philosopher was at its height. Hulme’s reading of Bergson helped to clarify his own views concerning the relationship between consciousness, language and the world. During the course of reading, and translating, Bergson’s An Introduction to Metaphysics, Hulme would undoubtedly have been struck by the following passage: Now the image has at least this advantage, that it keeps us in the concrete. No image can replace the intuition of duration, but many diverse images, borrowed from very different orders of things, may, by the convergence of their action, direct consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to be seized. By choosing images as dissimilar as possible, we shall prevent any one of them from usurping the place of the intuition it is intended to call up, since it would then be driven away at once by its rivals. (Bergson 1912, 16)

This passage highlights a crucial difference between Bergson’s philosophy and Hulme’s interpretation of it, for in his writings on Bergson Hulme would privilege a static model of poetry over the representation of ‘duration’ which Bergson emphasizes. Indeed, Eliot’s idea of the objective correlative – which commentators have linked with Hulme and Pound’s concept of the image – is in many ways more Bergsonian than Hulme’s static theory of images (e.g. see Beasley 2007, 45–6).

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The key word in Bergson’s explanation, and in Hulme’s translation, is ‘dissimilar’: a word which is subtly different from ‘different’ in that it implies an association which ‘different’ need not necessarily denote. A sunset and a robe are different objects, and they may well be red but there the similarity ends. But a sunset and an ‘etherised’ patient are dissimilar because there is a stronger underlying sense of connectedness, however arbitrary and odd the connections may be (the double meaning of ether, in this case). The point is that association lies as much in the how as in the what: this is the point upon which Hulme seizes time and again in his prose, and upon which his poetry turns. Things which are superficially different are shown to have associations, so that the connection between them is not merely one of simple difference but one of dissimilarity. It is all in how it is done. A good example of this is one of Hulme’s other sunset poems, which associates the setting sun with a red sore: I love not the Sunset That flaunts like a scarlet sore O’er half a sick sky, That calls aloud for all to gape At its beauty Like a wanton. (Hulme 2003, 10)

There is no superficial connection between the sunset and a sore, other than their redness; but the two things both carry connotations which can draw them together  – because skin conditions can be said to flare up, just as there are solar flares; because the sun is literally composed of fire, and that is how skin complaints can feel; because the sunset, as with illness and disease, can remind us of our eventual death. Perhaps there are deeper associations between the sunset and Hulme’s ‘vain maid’; but they are not so obvious. Hulme’s poetry best shows how his theory can be applied to art when he succeeds in finding images which can create these associations within the reader’s mind. The stanza develops into a comparison between the sunset and a prostitute or ‘wanton’, but here the association has grown less clear. The poetry has lost its tight focus of images. Hulme set out his own view of association in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, and employed an algebraic analogy. For Hulme prose is algebra and poetry an avoidance of it: ‘In prose as in algebra concrete things are embodied in signs or

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counters which are moved about according to rules, without being visualised at all in the process.’ Indeed, One only changes the X’s and Y’s back into physical things at the end of the process. Poetry, in one aspect at any rate, may be considered as an effort to avoid this characteristic of prose. It is not a counter language, but a visual concrete one. (Hulme 2003, 79–80)

Yet there are still rules in poetry, as there are in prose (and algebra): these associations between X and Y (or A and B) must make logical sense, and this is where Hulme’s poetry breathes new life into old poetic images. Hulme suggested not that poets reject association, but that they find new associations between images. Much imagist poetry – and Hulme’s poems were one of the starting-points of imagism – works in a similar way to a verbal puzzle; but it is a puzzle which we are not required consciously to solve. We have instead to register the associations between the images for the poem to have a logical and provocative element, for the poem to ‘make sense’. For Hulme, poetry ‘always endeavours to arrest you, and to make you continuously see a physical thing, to prevent you gliding through an abstract process’: It chooses fresh epithets and fresh metaphors, not so much because they are new, and we are tired of the old, but because the old cease to convey a physical thing and become abstract counters. A poet says a ship ‘coursed the seas’ to get a physical image, instead of the counter world ‘sailed’. Visual meanings can only be transferred by the new bowl of metaphor; prose is an old pot that lets them leak out. (80)

Even here, in a prose defence of a poetic practice, Hulme employs the sharp directness of metaphor over the teasing indirectness of simile. Prose is an old pot, not merely like an old pot. In order to create living poetry the poet must reject dead metaphors or ‘counters’, which the reader no longer stops to consider but has learned to take for granted. As he put it emphatically in ‘Notes on Language and Style’: ‘Each word must be an image seen, not a counter’ (Hulme 2003, 38). Free verse can help here, as rhyme and rhythm cannot be relied upon to provide a regular framework to the poetry; the reader must expect the unexpected, and so he/she concentrates on what is presented with renewed

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attention. Here Hulme had cause to reach for a less fresh but nevertheless apt analogy: ‘We are no longer concerned that stanzas shall be shaped and polished like gems, but rather than some vague mood shall be communicated. In all the arts, we seek for the maximum of individual and personal expression, rather than for the attainment of any absolute beauty’ (Hulme 2003, 63). The simile ‘shaped and polished like gems’ has a touch of cliché about it, the analogy shining not so brightly as it once did; but to liken stanzas to gems takes an unexpected turn, and so reinvigorates a dead simile, even in prose. The well-worn simile is nevertheless apt here, not least because it is the old form of poetry, which was predominantly reliant on regularity of rhythm, rhyme and metre, that Hulme is seeking to distance himself from. He would address this prose/verse distinction again in ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’, one of the essays included in the posthumous Speculations: The great difficulty in any talk about art lies in the extreme indefiniteness of the vocabulary you are obliged to employ. The concepts by which you endeavour to describe your attitude toward any work of art are so extraordinarily fluid. Words like creative, expressive, vital, rhythm, unity and personality are so vague that you can never be sure when you use them that you are not conveying over at all the meaning you intended to. This is constantly realised unconsciously; in almost every decade a new catch word is invented which for a few years after its invention does convey, to a small set of people at any rate, a definite meaning, but even that very soon lapses into a fluid condition when it means anything and nothing. (Hulme 1924, 143)

All poetic metaphors are destined to die and become prose. This is something Ralph Waldo Emerson had acknowledged in his 1844 essay ‘The Poet’: The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. (Emerson 1971, 215)

As Hulme would later put it, prose is ‘a museum where all the old weapons of poetry [are] kept’ (Hulme 2003, 41).

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Gemstones provide a useful symbol for Hulme. One of the ‘Images’ reads simply: Her skirt lifted as a dark mist From the columns of amethyst. (Hulme 2003, 14)

Columns of amethyst lifting like skirts: stalac-tights? Elsewhere the image of the gem is summoned to explore Hulme’s theory of poetry. In a poem known as ‘The Poet’ Hulme provides another instance of his theory-as-poetry, and returns to this metaphor. He also uses the hard, concrete image of the ‘table’ which Eliot would use to such great effect in ‘Prufrock’: Over a large table, smooth, he leaned in ecstasies, In a dream. He had been to woods, and talked and walked with trees. Had left the world And brought back round globes and stone images, Of gems, colours, hard and definite. With these he played, in a dream, On the smooth table. (Hulme 2003, 4)

Hulme cites this poem in its entirety in his ‘Notes on Language and Style’ (Hulme 2003, 48). On the page the poem is not gemlike, its form being fluid and unfixed, the length of its lines expanding and receding more like waves than the outline of a stone. The repetition of the phrase ‘in a dream’ suggests that the poet’s inspiration comes from somewhere other than the conscious, intellectual mind; this is an issue I will return to. But the main point of the poem is to reinvent poetry itself. The poem, as with many of Hulme’s verses, is self-referential. As with another of his poems, ‘The Embankment’, ‘The Poet’ shows us ecstasy, or rather ‘ecstasies’. The subtle play of images serves to highlight the aim of imagism; the word ‘images’ even appears itself, and this in a poem called provocatively (though only posthumously) ‘The Poet’. This poet had ‘left the world’ in order to return with ‘globes’ – mini-worlds, in other words. On the surface, the message is clear enough: to forge a new world, or worlds, we must leave the world as we know it behind. But to have ‘brought back round globes’: to return with globes which are round, or to bring globes back round (i.e. to bring the world back from a state of dormancy or stasis)? Here the poet is less clear. Whether we are forming a new world,

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or merely remaking the old one, the poet refuses to say. ‘We are no longer concerned that stanzas shall be shaped and polished like gems, but rather than some vague mood shall be communicated . . .’ The mood or sentiment conveyed by poetry may be vague or undefined, but the images must be concrete, not vague or abstract. The image of the table in ‘The Poet’ is definitely and defiantly ‘hard and definite’. It ties the poetry, and the mood the poetry seeks to convey, to a solid, stable object fixed to the earth by gravity. Hulme therefore sets his poetry up in opposition to what he identifies as the romantic approach to poetry: as he writes in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, ‘the whole of the romantic attitude seems to crystallise in verse round metaphors of flight’ (Hulme 2003, 72). By contrast: In the classical attitude you never seem to swing right along to the infinite nothing. If you say an extravagant thing which does exceed the limits inside which you know man to be fastened, yet there is always conveyed in some way at the end an impression of yourself standing outside it, and not quite believing it, or consciously putting it forward as a flourish. (72)

‘Yet there is always conveyed in some way at the end an impression of yourself standing outside it’: this encodes the root or origin of ‘ecstasy’, which comes from the Greek meaning to stand outside oneself. Ecstasy is, if not literally then at least etymologically speaking, outstanding. This theory is borne out time and again in Hulme’s poetry, which is forever making reference to ecstasy, whether it is the ‘ecstasies’ (4) of ‘The Poet’, the ‘very ecstasy of Nature’ (10) in ‘Autumn (II)’, the ‘ecstatic wave’ (8) of ‘Far Back There’, the ‘feigned ecstasy’ (2) of ‘Mana Aboda’, or the ‘ecstasy’ (2) of ‘The Embankment’. Such ecstasy underlines the broader theory in Hulme’s writing – and not just his poetry – that poetry should reflect something which contains ideas of ecstasy while at the same time we are aware that our feet are rooted to the ground beneath us. We may be standing still, unable to progress or fly off, but we are in the grip of ecstatic feelings even while in a static position. If Hulme’s reference to ‘yourself standing outside of ’ a particular experience suggests this literal origin of ecstasy, that stock word found in his poetry, then such etymological preoccupations are not limited to this instance. Etymology is at the core of Hulme’s distinction between the dead metaphors of prose and the fresh ones encountered in good modern poetry. Who would now guess, or at least recall when they hear the words used, that originally ‘wrong’ identified

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something physically twisted, or that to ‘imply’ initially signalled something folded within something else? In one of his essays on Bergson’s philosophy, Hulme ventured to explain himself through argument by etymology, in order to understand why the human intellect strives to understand the world through order and logic: The question arises: Why is the intellect satisfied in this way? The answer to this is quite simple and can be got from the etymology of the words which indicate explanation. Explanation means ex plane, that is to say, the opening out of things on a plain surface. There is the phrase, the chestnut explains its leaves, i.e. unfolds them. Then the French word is expliquer (explico) to unfold. The process of explanation is always a process of unfolding. A tangled mass is unfolded flat so that you can see all its parts separated out, and any tangle which can be separated out in this way must of course be an extensive manifold. (Hulme 1924, 177)

This shares something with Hulme’s idea of ‘counters’, or images which have become abstract, clichéd and devoid of their power to surprise or affect us. Even in expository (or, if you will, explanatory) prose, Hulme reminds us of the physical origins of ‘extensive’, meaning to stretch out – the tangled mass, for instance. Indeed, in 1909 he would write in a piece for the New Age: As in social life, it is dangerous to get too far away from barbarism. This new act of physical vision will destroy a good deal of the work done by the ‘counter’ manipulating of abstractions. For a recent example of this take the word ‘concept’ and the entirely new significance given to it by the pragmatists. (Hulme 1909, 316)

This acknowledges the altogether more non-abstract, physical origin of ‘concept’, meaning ‘take’. To ‘take the word “concept”’ is to perform, as Hulme knew, an act of etymological pleonasm. This is fine for prose, Hulme would say, because prose is ‘a museum where all the old weapons of poetry [are] kept’ (Hulme 2003, 41). But poetry requires a freshness of language which is free of ‘counters’ and clichés. Poetry is where language is reinvented and rejuvenated. ‘A word to me is a board with an image or statue on it’, he writes. ‘When I pass the word, all that goes is the board, the statue remains in my imagination’ (41). In ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, Hulme takes ‘a concrete example’ to illustrate his idea that modern poetry must contain ‘zest’. His particular example

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concerns ‘walking behind a woman in the street’ when ‘you notice the curious way in which the skirt rebounds from her heels. If that peculiar kind of motion becomes of such interest to you that you will search about until you can get the exact epithet which hits it off, there you had a properly aesthetic emotion’ (Hulme 2003, 81). One notices how ‘motion’ leads to ‘emotion’: emotion is decidedly active, searching out new experiences from the modern world. Hulme acted upon his theoretical example and sought to capture in poetry the example he had seized upon in prose, and this specific instance was put into a couplet: ‘The flounced edge of a skirt, / recoiling like waves off a cliff ’ (Hulme 2003, 15). Something small and everyday – the woman’s skirt – is likened to the eternal and vast image of the waves crashing against the cliff. (If cliffs can have faces, as in ‘cliff-face’, then why may they not be said to wear skirts? The anthropomorphizing analogy is simply developed into a new metaphor.) Or there are the lines from ‘Town Sky-line’: ‘Flora passing in disdain / Lifts her flounced blue gown, the sky’ (Hulme 2003, 6). The image of the gown or skirt recurs in Hulme’s poetry, and it is worth asking why he employs it. In his study of imagism, J. B. Harmer identifies the Cavalier poet Robert Herrick as one of the influences on Hulme’s poetry (Harmer 1975, 108). One of Herrick’s most famous poems, ‘Delight in Disorder’ describes A cuff neglectful, and thereby Ribbons to flow confusedly: A winning wave (deserving note) In the tempestuous petticoat: (Herrick 2000b, 147)

Herrick’s ‘wave’ seeks to combine the sea’s motion with the motion of the lady’s hand. Hulme’s ‘Town Sky-line’ tips a wink to Herrick, even if it is not waving but merely nodding: On a summer day, in Town, Where chimneys fret the cumuli, Flora passing in disdain Lifts her flounced blue gown, the sky. So I see her white cloud petticoat, Clear Valenciennes, meshed by twisted cowls, Rent by tall chimneys, torn lace, frayed and fissured. (Hulme 2003, 6)

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Hulme’s attraction to Herrick’s petticoat went further than this, too, as ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ makes clear. For just as he borrowed from, and developed, Herrick’s petticoat example in his poetry, so he sought to show in his manifesto for ‘classicism’ how Herrick’s example could be used by the modern poet: But it is the zest with which you look at the thing which decides you to make the effort. In this sense the feeling that was in Herrick’s mind when he wrote ‘the tempestuous petticoat’ was exactly the same as that which in bigger and vaguer matters makes the best romantic verse. It doesn’t matter an atom that the emotion produced is not of dignified vagueness, but on the contrary amusing; the point is that exactly the same activity is at work as in the highest verse. (Hulme 2003, 81)

Herrick’s tempest is like Hulme’s waves on the cliff: a powerful natural force which dwarfs mankind, showing humanity to be insignificant when juxtaposed with the world at large. Yet Herrick’s importance to Hulme may have gone beyond the petticoat which so appealed to him (and which can be seen in the fragment which talks of the ‘flounced edge of a skirt’). Herrick’s couplet on ‘The Definition of Beauty’ frames itself as a definition that is most definite in the treatment of its subject: Beauty, no other thing is, than a beam Flashed out between the middle and extreme. (Herrick 2000a, 147)

This is close to Hulme’s thesis that modern poetry should compare the classic subjects of poetry (the moon, beauty, ecstasy) to something clear and definite: beauty, says Herrick, is a beam of light. Compare this with Hulme’s fragmentary couplet: The mystic sadness of the sight Of a far town seen in the night. (Hulme 2003, 14)

Or there is his definition of beauty from ‘Mana Aboda’: ‘Beauty is the marking-time, the stationary vibration, the feigned ecstasy of any arrested impulse unable to reach its natural end’ (Hulme 2003, 2). Herrick is thus a proto-imagist in one sense, in that his work can be said to have influenced Hulme and to have anticipated the qualities of Hulme’s ‘imagist’ poems in

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several important ways. The short, pithy epigrams Herrick presents us with draw surprising connections between an abstract thing (beauty, excitement) and a more concrete or visible thing (a beam of light, the woman’s petticoat). But in fact what all of this also highlights is that Hulme’s formulation of the classical attitude, which sees man as being of limited power and limited importance, is not so clearly distinct from the ‘romantic’ attitude as Hulme would like to have us believe. I do not offer this as a startlingly new thesis: Frank Kermode said as much over 50 years ago in his critique of Hulme, when he observed that Hulme’s theory ‘makes a show of being in opposition to Romantic imprecision [. . .] but in fact it is fundamentally a new statement of the old defence of poetry against positivism and the universe of death’ (Kermode 1966, 129). For instance, Hulme states in ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’: Say the poet is moved by a certain landscape, he selects from that certain images which put into juxtaposition in separate lines, serve to suggest and to evoke the state he feels. To this piling-up and juxtaposition of distinct images in different lines, one can find a fanciful analogy in music. A great revolution in music when for the melody that is one-dimensional music, was substituted harmony which moves in two. Two visual images form what one may call a visual chord. They unite to suggest an image which is different to both. (Hulme 2003, 64)

But it is only because the two images being juxtaposed contain this tension between vastness and limitation, infinitude and finitude – in short, between romantic and classical  – that the poem works in any sense. Hulme’s poetry may privilege the classical over the romantic, but it is unable to be exclusively classical, since in order to become something recognizably poetic it needs to strike the right note (to develop Hulme’s musical analogy) between man and his surroundings, between the limited and the limitless. In this respect, we might see Hulme as a poststructuralist ahead of his time, rather than a rigid structuralist: he inverts the privileged term in the binary pair of romantic/ classical, but in doing so he cannot do away with the subordinate term, or romantic attitude, altogether. Hulme’s poetry is valuable because it reveals what the rhetorical excesses of his prose writing attempt to conceal: the poetry

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highlights that, in practice, one cannot have poetry without the romantic attitude, even if its presence is made secondary to the classical spirit.

The poet But if, for Hulme, man is bound by certain limitations, then at the same time the true poet is gifted with a knowledge of rhythm, cadence and music which enables him to transcend the mindset of the ‘man of intellect’. Thus he is a romantic, in one sense. Such an idea does not reject the emotional or the numinous, nor does it reject the poet’s ability to draw upon emotion to good effect within his or her work. This is a very Bergsonian idea, and echoes Bergson’s distinction between the mechanical and the vital, the latter of which is the domain of the artist alone. There is something imaginative and creative – indeed, romantic  – about the poet, and this distinguishes him from the mathematician or the scientist. Again, for all of his rejection of the romantic attitude, Hulme cannot erase its importance. Rebecca Beasley, who is such a careful and perceptive reader of Hulme’s work, observes that Hulme’s urge to write poetry sprang from his philosophical ideas concerning the relationship between language and thought, and here he was influenced by Bergson most of all (Beasley 2007, 12). This was in the first, pre-classical phase of his thinking, when he was led by the pragmatism of William James and the philosophical ideas of Henri Bergson; this was also the time when he wrote nearly all of his poetry. The world, for Hulme, is one of ‘cinders’, of endless plurality, and to make sense of the world we must create systems of order: These ordering systems take a number of forms: religious beliefs are one way of making sense of the world, mathematical formulae are another, and perhaps the ultimate ordering system is language itself. The trouble is, Hulme says, we tend to forget that these systems are simply an approximate, often arbitrary, means to understand the chaotic ‘real’ world lying underneath: we find ourselves thinking that they have some kind of intrinsic connection to reality, or indeed are reality. This, for Hulme, is where mathematics goes wrong. (Beasley 2007, 12)

Beasley also remarks that it ‘appears that the sheer size of the Canadian prairies challenged Hulme’s previously confident belief that the world could

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be explained in terms of mathematical principles’ (Beasley 2007, 12). Once again, the vastness of nature resists any easy categorization or ordering on the part of humanity. As Hulme would himself write in ‘Cinders’, which was begun in 1906–7 shortly after his time in Canada: ‘The flats of Canada are incomprehensible on any single theory’ (Hulme 2003, 22). Yet if it was his experience among the prairies of Canada in 1906 that convinced Hulme of the ‘inevitableness of verse’, then eight years later he would come to see how clearly poetry – true poetry rather than mere verse – required or involved something more than the formulae he had outlined in his earlier essays. In ‘German Chronicle’, published in the June 1914 issue of Poetry and Drama, Hulme concluded his survey of modern German poetry by remarking on some general features of modern poetry. In doing so, he was moved to draw a distinction between the poet and the man of intellect: I assume that the sensibility of the poet is possessed by many who themselves are not poets. The differentiating factor is something other than their sensibility. To simplify matters then, suppose a poet and an intelligent man both moved in exactly the same way by some scene; both desire to express what they feel; in what way does the expression differ? The difficulty of expression can be put in an almost geometrical way. The scene before you is a picture in two dimensions. It has to be reduced to verse, which being a line of words has only one dimension. However, this one-dimensional form has other elements of rhythm, sound, etc., which form as it were an emotional equivalent for the lost dimension. The process of transition from the one to the other in the case of the poet is possibly something of this kind. First, as in the case of all of us, the emotional impression. Then probably comes one line of words, with a definite associated rhythm – the rest of the poem follows from this. Now here comes the point. This first step from the thing clearly ‘seen’ to this almost blind process of development in verse, is the characteristic of the poet, and the step which the merely intelligent man cannot take. He sees ‘clearly’ and he must construct ‘clearly’. This obscure mixture of description and rhythm is one, however, which cannot be constructed by a rational process, i.e., a process which keeps all its elements clear before its eyes all the time. The handicap of the intelligent man who is not a poet is that he cannot trust himself to this obscure world from which rhythm springs. All that he does must remain ‘clear’ to him as he does it. How does he then set about the work of composition? All that he can do is to mention one by one the elements

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of the scene and the emotions it calls up. I am moved in a certain way by a dark street at night, say. When I attempt to express this mood, I make an inventory of all the elements which make up that mood. I have written verse of that kind myself, I understand the process. The result is immediately recognisable. Qualities of sincere first-hand observation may be constantly shown, but the result is not a poem. (Hulme 2003, 93)

This rhythm or musicality, then, is something only the true ‘poet’ can possess. Language and mathematics, those ordering systems through which we attempt to comprehend existence and the world around us, cannot on their own deliver a poem: some ‘obscure world’ gives rise to poetry when that word is used in a meaningful sense, and it cannot be captured in any intellectual equation for documenting poetic experience. This is the Bergsonian concept of intuition. But is it not also the romantic notion of imagination? Some transcendence on the part of the poet must go into the making of a poem. J. B. Harmer has noted that the imagists, whose philosophy of poetry was very similar to Hulme’s, leaned on and took largely from the French Symbolists, while at the same time they attempted to dissociate themselves from the cloudiness and vagueness into which the work of the lesser Symbolists had descended. In rejecting flummery they put themselves in danger of rejecting the mystery essential to poetry. (Harmer 1975, 159)

Hulme’s oversimplification of the nature of poetry, and his clear demarcations between romanticism and classicism, appear to have been largely a result of his attempt to distance his poetry from the mystical verse of the Symbolists. But deep down, as this overlooked passage from his work shows, he knew how essential this extra dimension was to poetry, even modern poetry. Even in 1914, when he wrote these words and had supposedly become an ardent exponent of the classical view, he acknowledged that something which we might call ‘romantic’ was necessary for poetry to be possible, at least any poetry worthy of the name. Hulme had begun to sharpen his thinking about this additional quality possessed by the poet, when he had undertaken a translation of Bergson’s An Introduction to Metaphysics (although how much of the translation was actually his own work has been questioned):

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Any one of us, for instance, who has attempted literary composition, knows that when the subject has been studied at length, the materials all collected, and the notes all made, something more is needed in order to set about the work of composition itself, and that is an often very painful effort to place ourselves directly at the heart of the subject, and to seek as deeply as possible an impulse, after which we need only let ourselves go. This impulse, once received, starts the mind on a path where it rediscovers all the information it had collected, and a thousand other details besides; it develops and analyses itself into terms which could be enumerated indefinitely. The farther we go, the more terms we discover; we shall never say all that could be said, and yet, if we turn back suddenly upon the impulse that we feel behind us, and try to seize it, it is gone; for it was not a thing, but the direction of a movement, and though indefinitely extensible, it is infinitely simple. Metaphysical intuition seems to be something of the same kind. (Bergson 1912, 89–91)

The bodily language of ‘heart’, ‘impulse’ (whose –pulse echoes the ‘heart’), and ‘mind’ all have a romantic flavour to them, suggesting that the poet requires some emotional engagement with his theme, some emotionally excessive response which will go towards the poem’s construction. Hulme’s inability to pin down the nature of this obscure world from which poetry springs suggests that, for all his rejection of the romantic attitude in verse, there remained some romantic impulse within true poets which contributed to its creation: that abstract and emotional response to a scene or a subject which gives rise to that first line of verse. Here we are in danger of plummeting deep into the world of the subjective: the well, to adopt Hulme’s own image, of romantic infinitude. For all its show of confidence and certitude, Hulme’s theory remains unable to account for the origin or source of poetry, whether it is poetry written in the romantic or classical style. There is, too, the issue of Hulme’s own assessment of his poetic talents. His conclusion that his own verse does not constitute true poetry seems, as J.  B.  Harmer remarks, ‘disproportionately harsh. It is as if Hulme misunderstood the nature of his own gift. His verse is stamped with a sensitive exactness of perception, a quality to be differentiated from the demand for precise observation set down in his lecture on poetry.’ Harmer surmises that Hulme may have ‘mistrusted the childlike wistfulness that is revealed in various of his poems’ (Harmer 1975, 55). But it is this childlike wistfulness

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that it could be argued makes Hulme a true poet, albeit a minor one; this issue will be treated in more detail in the next chapter. The important point is that, when Hulme tries to account for a classical movement in art, he cannot account for the numinous, emotional world from which poetry – as distinct from verse  – arises. Hulme needs romanticism, and he knows that poetry needs it too, but in the interests of rhetoric he plays down this necessity.

Visual chords ‘There is a synaesthetic quality to Hulme’s imagination’, Robert Ferguson remarks. ‘While hymn-singing once he has a vision of music as “a smooth rolling”’ (Ferguson 2002, 37). Hulme may not have suffered from literal synaesthesia, but his way of comprehending language simultaneously combines musical sensation with the perception of visual images. The point is important because it helps to explain why Hulme can never fully escape the romantic impulse, even while he privileges the classical mode. One observation – which some have framed as a criticism  – of Hulme’s theory of poetry is that it is too concerned with vision at the expense of sound and rhythm. It is as if, in rejecting conventional metre and rhyme, modern poetry in Hulme’s eyes was to relinquish completely the importance of the sound-effects of language. Hulme’s favouring of the analogy of sculpture over music to describe what modern poetry should do  – coupled with his numerous writings on Jacob Epstein’s work – show that he rejected the musicality of verse in favour of a focus on the visual over the aural, on sight rather than hearing. ‘This new verse resembles sculpture rather than music’, he writes in ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’; ‘it appeals to the eye rather than to the ear. It has to mould images, a kind of spiritual clay, into definite shapes. This material, the [hule] of Aristotle, is image not sound’ (Hulme 2003, 66). Here, the distinction seems clear enough: image not sound, rather than ‘image over sound’, or ‘image more than sound’. But if we look more closely at his writing, such as ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’, we see once again that Hulme’s attitude to poetry was not as reductive as such a simple binary would suggest: I quite admit that poetry intended to be recited must be written in regular metre, but I contend that this method of recording impressions by visual images in distinct lines does not require the old metric system.

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The older art was originally a religious incantation; it was made to express oracles and maxims in an impressive manner, and rhyme and metre were used as aids to the memory. But why, for this new poetry, should we keep a mechanism which is only suited to the old? The effect of rhythm, like that of music, is to produce a kind of hypnotic state, during which suggestions of grief or ecstasy are easily and powerfully effective, just as when we are drunk all jokes seem funny. This is for the art of chanting, but the procedure of the new visual art is just the contrary. It depends for its effect not on a kind of half sleep produced, but on arresting the attention, so much so that the succession of visual images should exhaust one. Regular metre to this impressionist poetry is cramping, jangling, meaningless, and out of place. Into the delicate pattern of images and colour it introduces the heavy, crude pattern of rhetorical verse. It destroys the effect just as a barrel organ does, when it intrudes into the subtle interwoven harmonies of the modern symphony. It is a delicate and difficult art, that of evoking an image, of fitting the rhythm to the idea, and one is tempted to fall back to the comforting and easy arms of the old, regular metre, which takes away all the trouble for us. (Hulme 2003, 64–5)

One is tempted to fall back to regular metre, and indeed several of Hulme’s poems would employ, if not rigid rhythms, then a recognizable rhyme scheme. But overall rhythmical metre appears to be at odds with the ‘delicate pattern of images’ modern poetry seeks to weave. However, the analogy Hulme goes on to employ complicates any straightforward opposition between music and image: metre is like a ‘barrel organ’ intruding upon the delicate harmonies of a symphony, and so sound is likened to sound, one musical metaphor conjoined with another. Modern poetry should be a delicate symphony, with images taking the place of chords; but it is telling in the highest extreme that Hulme chooses this musical analogy to express his idea, rather than his more favoured simile of sculpture. Modern poetry is visual, but is composed of visual ‘chords’. Edward Storer, another proto-imagist writing poems at the same time as Hulme, had placed music in a slightly more ancillary role in 1908 when he had argued: ‘It is quite possible that a nuance of suggestion may lie in a rhyme, and the added musical effect may give the actual meaning of the words a kind of spiritual iridescence or perfume . . . some rhyming must surely be allowed?’ (cited in Harmer 1975, 29). This musical angle is perhaps the numinous

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world from which true poetry arises, that originary sensibility from which the additional dimension of emotion springs in poetry worthy of the name. ‘The thing has got so bad now that a poem which is all dry and hard, a properly classical poem, would not be considered poetry at all’: so Hulme writes in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ (Hulme 2003, 75). Nor did Hulme feel he could bring himself to write poetry which was completely dry and hard, which contained no suggestion of wistfulness, regret, sadness or desire. These emotions do not themselves necessarily render a poem romantic by their inclusion; but they do suggest that Hulme’s ‘classical’ model of poetry tends to overstate the case somewhat. ‘Speaking of personal matters’, Hulme remarks in his lecture on poetry, ‘the first time I ever felt the necessity of inevitableness of verse, was in the desire to reproduce the peculiar quality of feeling which is induced by the flat spaces and wide horizons of the virgin prairie of western Canada’ (Hulme 2003, 64). Alan Robinson responded to this: ‘He is surely describing a numinous experience’ (Robinson 1985, 77). It may not be infinite or transcendent, but it is certainly not dry or hard in its subject-matter: Hulme was inspired to write poetry when he was confronted by something of such vastness that he felt that a poem was the only possible way to reflect its scale. That Hulme did not reject music in modern poetry can be seen earlier in the lecture, when he affirms: To this piling-up and juxtaposition of distinct images in different lines, one can find a fanciful analogy in music. A great revolution in music when for the melody that is one-dimensional music, was substituted harmony which moves in two. Two visual images form what one may call a visual chord. They unite to suggest an image which is different to both. (Hulme 2003, 64)

What Hulme strives to achieve in poetry is nothing short of a sort of visual music: rather than seeing such a paradox in his thought as yet another sign of his philosophical and artistic inconsistency, it might be more helpful to see Hulme’s vision of poetry as one which champions the visual over the aural, but does not seek to do away with the musicality of poetry altogether. Here it becomes necessary to disagree with Harvey Gross and Robert McDowell, who assert that ‘Hulme goes so far as to deny that sound is the basic material of verse’ and that his ‘confusion about the basic material of poetry – language which is organized sound moving in time – dismisses prosody as of no

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central importance in poetic structure’ (Gross et al. 1996, 100–1). But language is not merely ‘sound moving in time’; it may also be soundless and unmoving on the page. And how many of Hulme’s poems actually reject rhyme and metre altogether? Of the five poems which appeared in ‘The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme’ in 1912, ‘Above the Dock’ is in couplets, ‘The Embankment’ features tight rhymes such as ‘sky’ and ‘lie’ and concludes with a couplet, and ‘Mana Aboda’ closes with a strong cry/try rhyme. Even in the more liberated examples of free verse to be found among his poems, there is an often delicate interplay between different sounds, so that it cannot be said that his poetry rejects sound entirely in favour of the image. Hulme’s poetry demonstrates an awareness of what we might call ‘visual sound’, a sort of interrelatedness between words that can be read on the page as well as heard in speech. Consider the changes he made to the ending of ‘Sunset’ in the two extant drafts: Quíet – in a cóol harbour At éve After wórk Silent, in a cool harbour At eve, After labour. (Hulme 2003, 10–11)

The alteration of ‘wórk’ to ‘labour’ does not change the image of the poem – which likens the sun setting to the action of a ship pulling into the harbour after a long day at sea  – but it does alter the sound, as ‘labour’ plays off ‘harbour’, complementing it and developing it. As with the play of ‘old’ with ‘scaffolding’ and ‘were’ with ‘workmen’ in the fragment beginning ‘Old houses were scaffolding once’, the poem may primarily be concerned with conveying an image, but Hulme is aware of the value of paying attention to the sounds of the words employed to convey that image. Such an attention to the importance of sound is seen again in ‘The Sunset’, yet another poem to offer a new take on that age-old artistic trope: A coryphée, covetous of applause, Loth to leave the stage, With final diablerie, poises high her toe, Displays scarlet lingerie of carmin’d clouds, Amid the hostile murmurs of the stalls. (Hulme 2003, 9)

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The rhythm of this, and the recourse to prepositions to portray the relations of the everyday things described, is similar to the effects found in T. S. Eliot’s poem ‘Morning at the Window’ and various imagist poems. But the reliance on alliteration and other sound-effects (‘coryphée’ and ‘covetous’, ‘Loth’ and ‘leave’ and ‘carmin’d clouds’, but also ‘hostile’ and ‘stalls’ and the French triplet of ‘coryphée’, ‘diablerie’ and ‘lingerie’) show that Hulme, unlike many of the imagist poets, saw the importance of employing such poetic devices in order to present the image in an effective and memorable way. This is a more effective description of the sunset than ‘A City Sunset’ not only because its image is more striking and specific (not just a ‘vain maid’, but a ballet dancer) but because Hulme is paying more attention to the sounds as well as the images. The lyrical and linguistic mastery of later modernists such as James Joyce and T. S. Eliot is here prefigured: while all three writers are interested in rethinking and reimagining the image, they are also aware that a poem or novel presents images through a language which is reliant on the sounds of words, not their mere appearance. For all his talk of modern poetry as something which is read rather than chanted, Hulme knows that, just because you may reject conventional rhyme and metre, this does not mean you need to throw out all other traditions of poetry as well. When Pound became the driving force behind imagism in 1912, he made the musicality of poetic language a feature of his third tenet of the movement: ‘As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome’ (quoted in Ferguson 2002, 64). It may no longer work with regular metre or rhythm, but modern poetry nevertheless required the poet to possess skill in creating rhythms and patterns that would effectively convey the images of the poem to the reader. ‘They unite to suggest an image which is different to both’: Hulme’s ‘visual chord’ works like a musical chord, because the two images which are united form a new, compound image which is different from either of the two individual images (just as water, though composed of both hydrogen and oxygen, is neither hydrogen nor oxygen). So, when a romantic symbol (such as the moon) is joined with a classical symbol (the red-faced farmer), the resulting effect, Hulme argues, is to create a new kind of hybrid image which strikes the reader as new and arresting. But is this new compound ‘image’ romantic or classical in significance? Is the moon being classicized

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or is the farmer being romanticized? Or is this final image neither romantic nor classical?2 What Hulme fails to acknowledge is that, although he may call for a classical philosophy of poetry, poetry itself must be instilled with something of the romantic: traditional human emotion, a sense of the infinite, and – most importantly  – a sense of the abstract (‘wistful’ cannot be converted entirely into an image, so the emotion must be summoned through the word). Elsewhere, of course, Hulme does not even reject traditional rhyme. But he also saw the value of internal rhymes and echoes, something we encounter again and again in his poems and something which is seen time and again in Eliot’s poetry. This is seen in the notebook fragments Hulme never chose to publish in his lifetime: This to all ladies gay I say, Away, abhorréd lace, away. (Hulme 2003, 14)

The message or conceit of the poem is trivial, and we might even say that the poem is more an exercise in poetic sounds than it is a procession of images. The sound of ‘ladies’, ‘gay’, ‘say’, ‘Away’, ‘lace’ and ‘away’ all unite the fragment (in so far as a fragment can be said to be united), but there is no original image as we find in Hulme’s other poems. His best poems are those which marry an attention to the sounds and patterns required of free verse with the striking and original images the poem needed to make an impact. As Vincent Sherry notes, ‘Hulme subdued the music of his imagist poetry, but he crafted its acoustic surface with exacting attention to rhythmical period and stress. [. . .] It is thus understandable that Hulme’s decision to quit writing verse, late in 1911, should coincide with a decided reaction against music’ (Sherry 1993, 34–5). ‘Poetry not for others, but for the poet’: Hulme’s line also points up, I would suggest, another social development underlying his desire for a return to classicism. It is fitting that Hulme should have chosen to present his new theory of modern poetry in the form of a lecture, since at the time he was writing a new academic discipline was being established in British universities: English literature. It is almost as if Hulme’s lecture is intended as an antidote to those now being given in universities on Shakespeare, Milton and the Romantics: where the new discipline stressed tradition and, particularly, romanticism and humanism, Hulme stressed classicism and a revolution in modern poetry.

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As Terry Eagleton has observed of this period during Hulme’s youth, when English literature was becoming an academic discipline: Morality is no longer to be grasped as a formulated code or explicit ethical system: it is rather sensitive preoccupation with the whole quality of life itself, with the oblique, nuanced particulars of human experience. Somewhat rephrased, this can be taken as meaning that the old religious ideologies have lost their force, and that a more subtle communication of moral values, one which works by ‘dramatic enactment’ rather than rebarbative abstraction, is thus in order. (Eagleton 1995, 27)

Eagleton quotes George Gordon, one of the first men to hold the title of Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, in the early twentieth century: ‘England is sick, and [. . .] English literature must save it. The Churches (as I understand) having failed, and social remedies being slow, English literature has now a triple function: still, I suppose, to delight and instruct us, but also, and above all, to save our souls and heal the State’ (23). Such high-flown and romantic-sounding notions would no doubt have appalled Hulme. Many of the ideas underpinning the establishment of English Literature as an academic subject in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century ran contradictory to Hulme’s own attitudes towards literature: that studying poetry put us in touch with something spiritual and transcendent, replacing the role previously played by religion; that the study of English could make us aware of the great tradition of poetry stretching back to Milton and Shakespeare; and that studying poetry could help counter ‘ideological extremism’ (25), to borrow Eagleton’s phrase. Sir Walter Raleigh, another early holder of the title of Professor of English at Oxford, held his own academic subject in considerable contempt, and turned to war propaganda after the outbreak of the First World War, thus joining Hulme in less romantic and altogether more bellicose pursuits. Hulme’s poetic fragment which begins ‘Raleigh in the dark tower prisoned’ is almost certainly about the other Walter Raleigh, the Elizabethan scholar and explorer imprisoned in the Tower of London by Elizabeth I; but in light of Hulme’s fraught relationship with academia it is tempting to see the ‘dark tower’ of the poem as Hulme’s vision of the ivory towers of the university (Hulme 2003, 14). Such a thesis is strengthened by what we know of Hulme: that he had studied at Cambridge (twice), though he had chosen not to study the arts but

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rather mathematics; that on both occasions he appears to have been less than dedicated to academic study; that the liberal humanist agenda of many of the people who sought to establish English literature as a university subject was at odds with Hulme’s own later anti-liberal, anti-humanist doctrine. He is more concerned with poetry as something to be enjoyed by someone travelling to work in the Tube or settling down for a rest after dinner than the new, loftier objectives of students and professors of English literature. In the opening paragraph of his lecture on modern poetry, Hulme states: ‘The President told us last week that poetry was akin to religion. It is nothing of the sort. It is a means of expression just as prose is and if you can’t justify it from that point of view it’s not worth preserving’ (Hulme 2003, 59). The liberal humanist undertaking to establish literary studies within universities was, in part, an attempt to plug the gap left by the decline of religion, as Eagleton has noted (Eagleton 1995, 22–3). Of course, the counter-argument could be made that none of this necessarily makes Hulme’s poetry – or poetic outlook – romantic rather than classical, but it does force us to reassess his claims about poetry as being ‘dry’ and ‘hard’; we must remember that to these two adjectives he appended a third, ‘classical’. As Kathleen Flanagan has observed, ‘Hulme rejected nineteenth-century English Romantic poets as models for the new poetic movement without noting that these poets themselves argued for many of the same poetic agenda as early twentieth-century poets’ (Flanagan 1994, 117–18). Flanagan goes on to quote Hulme’s statement that ‘I object even to the best of the romantics’ (Hulme 2003, 75), remarking: ‘In this rejection Hulme ignored William Wordsworth’s claim that in Lyrical Ballads he “at all times endeavoured to look steadily at my subject; consequently, there is I hope in these Poems little falsehood of description”’ (Flanagan 1994, 118). Hulme’s rejection of romanticism also failed to take into account Wordsworth’s thesis that romantic poetry should use the plain language of ordinary people. What this suggests is that it is in form more than content that Hulme was a poetic innovator, and although any clear distinction between the two should be resisted, that it was largely in style rather than subject-matter that Hulme was an innovator. He takes Wordsworth’s call for a plain language of poetry and scales it down further, rejecting any excessive rhetoric or emotional content. But he certainly did not reject the romantic element of poetry altogether. His

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classicism stops short of the neo-classicists like Pope or Dryden. As he writes in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, ‘The thing has got so bad now that a poem which is all dry and hard, a properly classical poem, would not be considered poetry at all. How many people now can lay their hands on their hearts and say they like either Horace or Pope?’ (Hulme 2003, 75). But the intellectual wit of Pope is not something which Hulme strove to emulate in his own poetry, nor would his followers the imagists. Even his couplets allow emotion of some sort into them. Hulme goes on to say that those who champion romantic poetry ‘cannot see that accurate description is a legitimate object of verse’ (75), a statement to which many romanticists would have objected. ‘Verse to them always means a bringing in of some of the emotions that are grouped round the word infinite’ (75); but as Hulme’s poetic preoccupation with moons, stars, the sea and the sky demonstrates, he could not reject these emotions himself. It was the perspective through which we viewed these infinite things that needed to change.

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Star-Eaten: Hulme’s Romantic Images

Moons Hulme’s role as a cultural lightning-rod for many influential ideas at the beginning of the twentieth century  – classicism, modernist art and poetry, the ‘religious attitude’ – is well attested. Jesse Matz observes: ‘What Coleridge was to the nineteenth century, some argue, Hulme was to the twentieth – “the pioneer who helped to clear the frontiers of twentieth-century consciousness,” the impresario of interdisciplinarity who helped modern theories of mind to transform modernist literature’ (Matz 2004, 339). The comparison is bold, but it bears closer examination. Hulme’s relationship with Coleridge is perhaps surprising, given Hulme’s dislike of much romantic literature produced in the nineteenth century (he even mentions Coleridge as one of the ‘romantics’ whose outlook he rejects) but there are a number of important ideas which Hulme took from the poet and author of Biographia Literaria (Hulme 2003, 71). However, while he took them, he also mistook them, and his use of Coleridge’s terms rests on a misreading of the distinctions Coleridge made in his work. For Hulme, if modern poetry was going to succeed in finding new images and metaphors with which to express modern emotions, then these metaphors must be appropriate yet surprising, unusual yet ultimately logical. And it was none other than Coleridge, a writer Hulme admired despite his romantic affiliations, who first secured the distinction between the two terms ‘Imagination’ and ‘Fancy’, terms which had previously been used interchangeably. In his Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridge argued that Imagination denoted something ‘essentially vital’, but

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Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word Choice. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association. (Coleridge 1983, 305)

Here it is obvious that Hulme misreads, whether wilfully or accidentally, Coleridge’s distinction between Imagination and Fancy: whereas for Coleridge the former term is privileged over the latter (Coleridge’s Fancy is similar to Hulme’s talk of prose as ‘all counters’), Hulme seizes upon the ‘fixities and definites’ of Fancy and exalts that term instead, despite its reliance on prose-like counters. In doing so he creates a paradox between the Bergsonian model for poetry which creates fresh images, and the Coleridgian model of Fancy which deals in ‘definites’ – but definites which are associated with ‘counters’ rather than fresh images. As Hulme writes in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’: It is very difficult to use any terminology at all for this kind of thing. For whatever word you use is at once sentimentalized. Take Coleridge’s word ‘vital’. It is used loosely by all kinds of people who talk about art, to mean something vaguely and mysteriously significant. In fact, vital and mechanical is to them exactly the same antithesis as between good and bad. Nothing of the kind; Coleridge uses it in a perfectly definite and what I call dry sense. It is just this: A mechanical complexity is the sum of its parts. Put them side by side and you get the whole. Now vital or organic is merely a convenient metaphor for a complexity of a different kind, that in which parts cannot be said to be elements as each one is modified by the other’s presence, and each one to a certain extent is a whole. The leg of a chair by itself is still a leg. My leg by itself wouldn’t be. Now the characteristic of the intellect is that it can only represent complexities of the mechanical kind. It can only make diagrams, and diagrams are essentially things whose parts are separate from one another. The intellect always analyses – when there is a synthesis it is baffled. That is why the artist’s work always seems mysterious. The intellect can’t represent it. This is a necessary consequence of the particular nature of the intellect and the purposes for which it is formed. It doesn’t mean that your synthesis is ineffable, simply that it can’t be definitely stated. (Hulme 2003, 82)

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To comprehend the ‘vital’ work of art you need to employ the Bergsonian concept of intuition, since the intellect can only grasp ‘extensive’ things, whereas ‘intensive’ ideas such as the nature of art must be comprehended by the indefinite and internal world of intuition. Bergsonian intuition, as Hulme would shortly come to realize after he wrote this essay, is not so far removed from the romantic impulse for which Hulme professes such distaste; without it, poetry and art in general are impossible, because they are not comprehended by the intellect alone. Another aspect of Coleridge’s definition of Fancy would have appealed to Hulme. The ‘law of association’ would become Hulme’s guiding principle, and his poetry is the expression of Fancy par excellence. If Coleridge’s talk of ‘counters’ seems to foreshadow Hulme’s own description of ‘modern prose’ as ‘all counters’ which ‘pass to conclusions without thinking’ (Hulme 2003, 38), then this is because Hulme ‘probably founded some of his terminology on the Biographia Literaria’, as J. B. Harmer has suggested (Harmer 1975, 106). Coleridge’s talk of associations being ready-made also presages Hulme’s own poetic associations, which would be founded upon the new and original, but would nevertheless appear to be inevitable, as though there were a natural link between the two things being associated. Frank Kermode highlighted Hulme’s slight misunderstanding of Coleridge’s thought in a delicious parenthesis in his chapter on Hulme, included in Romantic Image: Note that Hulme is evasive and inconsistent about Coleridge’s Imagination, fearing that there is some connexion between it and the hated divinisation of human intellect that denies limit; he seems to have been unaware of the controlling force over Coleridge’s thought of his refusal to give up Original Sin, whatever metaphysical labour this refusal might involve him in. In fact Hulme’s ‘intellect’ is much the same as the Coleridgean and Wordsworthian ‘reason’, the reflective faculty that partakes of death. (Kermode 1966, 126–7)

Yet Hulme’s concept of fancy was defined on slightly different terms from those of Coleridge. ‘It seems to him that one must distinguish between imagination and fancy’, Glenn Hughes remarked, ‘and for the purposes of his own discussion he limits imagination to the realm of the emotions, and fancy to the realm of finite things’ (Hughes, 1931, 17). Yet these finite things must trigger some form of emotion in the poem’s reader, and this will happen when

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there is a clear and illuminating connection made between two things. ‘When the analogy has not enough connection with the thing described to be quite parallel with it,’ Hulme would write in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, ‘where it overlays the thing it described and there is a certain excess, there you have the play of fancy – that I grant is inferior to imagination.’ However, he goes on: But where the analogy is every bit of it necessary for accurate description [. . .] and your only objection to this kind of fancy is that it is not serious in the effect it produces, then I think the objection to be entirely invalid. If it is sincere in the accurate sense, when the whole of the analogy is necessary to get out the exact curve of the feeling or thing you want to express – there you seem to me to have the highest verse, even though the subject be trivial and the emotions of the infinite far away. (Hulme 2003, 81–2)

Poetry may deal with the small, the trivial, the finite and the concrete, but it can still be true poetry if the associations are right. These associations, however, are not grounded in the intellect alone, for there must be some emotional association present. As the last chapter explored, Hulme’s ‘classical’ poetry nevertheless requires some conventional emotional aspect. Yet how does a poet go about finding the right analogy, in order to express ‘the exact curve of the feeling’? The essential paradox of Hulme’s theory and poetry, and of imagism more generally, was this locating of a new association which would yet strike the reader as logical, effective, suggestive – in a word, right. Old metaphors were dead, and had become ‘counters’ which were meaningless as poetry, but new metaphors must be chosen well, if they were to have the desired effect. But what effect? The poem must still produce an emotional response in the reader, even if this emotional response partakes of a restrained, limited kind (Hulme’s classicism). And yet too an arbitrary association between two things will have limited value to the poet: it may strike the reader as a novelty at the outset, but the effect is likely to be minimized if the analogy is without any logic or sense. As Alan Robinson frames it, This removal of the intermediate stages in the simile, what could be described as a poetic syllogism, results in daring juxtapositions. Without proceeding so far as parataxis, Hulme nevertheless melts links in the chain of mental associations, leaving disjunct statements which the reader must himself expand to discover their original intuitive connection. (Robinson 1985, 80)

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This chapter will look at the ways in which Hulme uses images in his poetry. In particular, the focus will be on a small number of perennial images in poetry: the moon, the stars and the sea. In one of his first published poems, ‘Autumn’, Hulme presents us with a prime example of the kind of association or simile which could strike the right balance, in presenting the reader with an analogy which is both unusual yet natural: A touch of cold in the Autumn night – I walked abroad, And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge Like a red-faced farmer. I did not stop to speak, but nodded, And round about were the wistful stars With white faces like town children. (Hulme 2003, 1)

The comparison of the moon with a red-faced farmer may strike us as odd, but then it is not as if there is no association between the two; for the setting of the poem is autumn, and that is the time of the harvest moon, and farmers bring in the harvest.1 It is this unspoken word, ‘harvest’ (which Hulme trusts his reader to summon at the back of his or her memory) that makes the connection for us. Without it the poem is merely wilful and odd: a novelty, perhaps, but nothing more lasting or deep. Here the intellect is employed, but there are other associations present in the poem which go beyond the world of the intellect or the ‘extensive manifold’ (in Bergson’s phrase). The poem evokes autumn not by the more obvious recourse to images of harvest or falling leaves, but through a series of suggestions and associations. The main simile may be simple, but the attendant details add to this central image or association. ‘A touch of cold’ because the summer is on the wane, but the harshness of winter is not yet upon us: ‘touch’ suggests the intensity of a sensory experience, while at the same time playing down this intensity through its understated phrasing. The simile in the final line, ‘white faces like town children’, pairs the stars with the moon but it does this through pairing the rural farmer with the urban children. Where is this scene witnessed? Where is the ‘abroad’ of which Hulme speaks: out of London and into the country? Is there a touch of autobiography to the poem? When Paul Selver first saw Hulme he was struck by the ‘florid countenance’ of someone who seemed to be ‘probably a young gentlemanly farmer spending the weekend in town’ (Selver 1959, 25–6).

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Like many modernist texts, the poem leaves much unsaid, but there are many things which it merely leaves unstated, preferring instead to suggest them. The meaning lies beneath the surface. As Michael Levenson has noted: Of importance here is the relation between these two, fairly obvious, characteristics. For just to the extent that the poetic subject remains muted and slight does the role of the image become predominant. In the absence of any narrative, any development of ideas, any articulation of character, the images themselves come to attract the poetic regard. Further, in being so stressed, they stand against the triviality of the poetic scene. (Levenson 1984, 45–6)

The poem makes us think about the images, rather than offering obvious connections which will have no effect on us as readers: it counters ‘counters’. The poem is restrained (‘A touch of cold’, ‘I did not stop to speak, but nodded’), thus fulfilling Hulme’s own requirement that poetry be ‘classical’ and avoid the temptation to fly off into the world of the infinite. But it is not without emotion: the original draft of the poem did not contain the word ‘wistful’ in the penultimate line, but, as Robert Ferguson notes, this is ‘the only emotive word in the poem’ (Ferguson 2002, 51). Hulme knew that without it, the poem would read too much like an intellectual exercise, too devoid of emotion. Some pathetic fallacy (for how can stars be wistful?) is required. The moon was an image Hulme evidently viewed as central to the reinvention of poetry that he strove to bring into being. It is a classic image which is now to be given the classical treatment. In another poem, ‘Above the Dock’, the moon is likened to a balloon and children are summoned as the image’s complement once more: Above the quiet dock in mid night, Tangled in the tall mast’s corded height, Hangs the moon. What seemed so far away Is but a child’s balloon, forgotten after play. (Hulme 2003, 2)

Rebecca Beasley has looked at the moon and seen much that is significant: Like ‘Autumn’, the poem has a very traditional subject: the moon in the night sky. But Hulme departs from traditional treatments of the subject, such as those that muse on female beauty or love. Hulme’s interest here is not in the associations the moon has for us, the moon as ‘an abstract counter’ that

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means beauty or love. Instead, Hulme wants us to see the moon itself as if for the first time, to get the ‘original visual effect’. To achieve this he finds a ‘fresh metaphor’, that of the child’s balloon. This everyday reference has the effect of undercutting the romantic, poetic associations of the moon: it helps us to focus on the moon as a ‘physical thing’. (Beasley 2007, 37)

Yet the balloon is not completely devoid of association with the moon, not only by being ball-shaped when it is full; for the moon as a balloon works by rhyme-association (the internal chiming of ‘moon’ with ‘balloon’), but also through the ‘loon’ that ‘balloon’ contains, reminding us of the lunar. ‘Humans have been making associations with the moon since the beginning of human history,’ Simon Brittan has remarked, ‘and the chances of hitting upon precisely the same one that occurred to Hulme are practically zero’ (Brittan 2003, 188). As has already been noted, Hulme’s theory of poetry  – that two images should be brought together in a surprising manner  – derives partly from his reading of Bergson, and specifically from Bergson’s concept of intuition. Hulme would write in his essay on Bergson’s theory of intensive manifolds: For instance, when the alarum clock strikes in the morning, the impression does not as a rule disturb the whole consciousness like a stone falling into a pool of water, but merely stirs an idea solidified on the surface, the idea of getting up. The two ideas both solidified, as it were, on the top of the mind have in the end become tied up with one another, so that one follows the other without the deeper self being at all involved. The majority of our daily acts are performed in this way and it is greatly to one’s advantage that such is the case. (Hulme 1924, 190–1)

Hulme’s verse is an application of something roughly approximating this idea to the practice of poetry – the association alarms us at first, because it is unexpected, but we nevertheless pick up on some deeper association between the images being presented. As with the example of the alarm clock, we do not have to register and analyse all of the associations between the moon and the balloon to enjoy the poem. But what an analysis of the mechanics of the poem highlights is how Hulme applies Bergsonian principles to literature, in order to inject it with both this sense of striking originality and, balancing this, an awareness of the ways in which intuition is brought to bear on poetry. It is not the rational intellect that does the work, but some other part of our minds.

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Applying this concept of intuition to ‘Above the Dock’, then, we can see that we are invited to see the comparison or association between the moon and the balloon as representative of feelings we can all relate to: a loss of childhood innocence, and the realization that while the moon is constant for the passing generations, a balloon is not.2 Indeed, balloons are notoriously ephemeral things. In ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, Hulme would later write: What I mean by classical in verse, then, is this. That even in the most imaginative flights there is always a holding back, a reservation. The classical poet never forgets this finiteness, this limit of man. He remembers always that he is mixed up with earth. He may jump, but he always returns back; he never flies away into the circumambient gas. (Hulme 2003, 71)

Hulme’s contention is that poetry is coming down to earth with a bump. One of the two-line fragments published posthumously in the New Age reads: The lark crawls on the cloud Like a flea on a white body. (Hulme 2003, 14)

Here the objects seem deliberately chosen to present a contrast between flight and restraint, between the infinite and the finite. For while larks can fly away, fleas can merely jump; clouds are associated with the sky and heavens, but white bodies are tangible and altogether less ethereal. Once again, Hulme’s central conception of humankind as flawed and imperfect  – the ‘classical’ attitude – acts as the spur or impetus for his images. For what images could more readily conjure a world of flight or the infinite than the moon and a lark?3 And yet, what images could seek to undermine this perception of the infinite better than a balloon and a flea? This sense of finiteness amid seemingly infinite flights of imagination is what ‘Above the Dock’ seeks to capture, in the literal flight of the child’s balloon. For just as children quickly grow sick of their toys, so they also grow up quickly, too, and one generation must give way to the next, for whom the moon will appear just as it did once for us. The moon is destined to be around for longer than we will, and is practically eternal – in a word, infinite – when compared to the fleeting existence of a child’s balloon. Hulme’s poem elicits this

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response without being sentimental about it: the ‘but’ in the last line is poised between cool, literal statement or understatement of something physical (what the speaker took for the moon is only a discarded toy) and the suggestion of something approaching the metaphysical (that, since life is so short for us, the moon might as well be as earthly and ephemeral as a child’s balloon). One of Hulme’s notes reads: But what of the relation of this to ordinary life and people? They have their own hereditary (sentimental) chess-boards, which remain the same until changed by the survival of some of those of the literary man. The earnest striving after awkward and new points of view, such as that from a balloon, the useful seen from the non-useful attitude. (Hulme 2003, 53)

But in his own poetry, all Hulme could offer was the view of a balloon, but from the ground: man remains firmly rooted to the earth. What a close analysis of these poems reveals is this recurring notion that man is fundamentally bound to his surroundings, and cannot escape them. This is Hulme’s ‘classicism’, which stands strikingly against the romantic idea (ideal?) that humans are limitless in their possibilities. He would write in ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’: The ancients were perfectly aware of the fluidity of the world and of its impermanence; there was the Greek theory that the whole world was a flux. But while they recognised it they feared it and endeavoured to evade it, to construct things of permanence which would stand fast in this universal flux which frightened them. They had the disease, the passion, for immortality. They wished to construct things which should be proud boasts that they, men, were immortal. We see it in a thousand different forms. Materially in the pyramids, spiritually in the dogmas of religion and in the hypostatised ideas of Plato. Living in a dynamic world they wished to create a static fixity where their souls might rest. (Hulme 2003, 62)

This, for Hulme, explains the fixity of form that had been a feature of poetry for so long: rhyme, stanza forms, regular metre and the other trappings by which poetry had been bound for nearly 2,000 years. ‘They wish to embody in a few lines a perfection of thought’ (62), he goes on. A reaction against this can be seen to run throughout his poetry. The few lines of verse to which even the longest of his poems run seek not to capture

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an idea in perfection, but rather ‘some vague mood’ (62). But analysis of how his poems achieve this sense of man’s flawed and restricted nature, and what they were reacting against – the altogether more effusive and optimistic poetry of the Victorians and their successors – highlights just how difficult it was to reconcile this rejection of romanticism with a notion of the ‘poetic’ in the sense most people would recognize. The Man in the Crow’s Nest (Look-out Man) Strange to me, sounds the wind that blows By the masthead, in the lonely night Maybe ’tis the sea whistling – feigning joy To hide its fright Like a village boy That trembling past the churchyard goes. (Hulme 2003, 3)

Here, man is literally all at sea, and yet he is not stranded but rooted: rooted to the boat which is the only thing separating him from the cruel vastness of the sea beneath. He may be in the air, but only by virtue of the wooden pole which places him there. The title is faintly mocking: unlike the real crow in its nest, this man in a crow’s nest cannot fly away. But the Ruskinian pathetic fallacy is fallacious, for what would the sea be frightened of? In many ways it is a trivial poem: it shows Hulme’s inability or disinclination to free himself either from ‘romantic’ conceits (the almost clichéd pathetic fallacy of the wind whistling, transported to the sea) or from the constraints of conventional rhyme (each line here finds a match). The inverted and unnatural syntax (‘Strange to me, sounds the wind . . .’) is also something that Pound and the imagists would seek to avoid. The associations or analogies Hulme makes in his poetry, which seek to echo his dictum that modern poetry should be about ‘recording impressions by visual images in distinct lines’, are another method of showcasing man’s limits, as the earthly finds itself juxtaposed – indeed, contrasted – with the ethereal. Hulme’s poetry may not be overly interested in the heavenly, despite his championing of the ‘religious attitude’ in his later writings; but it is preoccupied with the heavens, with suns, moons, stars and clouds. The word which can be seen again and again in Hulme’s poetry is ‘sky’. The two central tenets of Hulme’s poems – juxtaposition of two images and the flawed nature of humanity  – are often

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most clearly glimpsed in the couplet form which Hulme adopts in some of the poems only published after his death (Hulme 2003, 64). Another of Hulme’s posthumous fragments reads: With a courtly bow the bent tree sighed, May I present you to my friend the sun. (Hulme 2003, 14)

The pun on bow/bough (the act of bowing, but trees have boughs) is not intrusive, and serves merely to show us the oddity behind the image of a tree being said to ‘bow’. (Indeed, the tree could be said to be a stand-in for humanity in this poem, taking the place usually reserved for the person in Hulme’s poetry.) Again, the tree is bound to the ground – indeed, positively rooted – whereas the sun is far away in the sky, suggesting the boundless and infinite. Once again, the world of the urban (the court) and the rural (the tree) are brought together through the analogy, but also cunningly through the words, as the progression ‘courtly bow the bent tree sighed’ looks and sounds remarkably like a dispersal of the word ‘countryside’. And ‘looks’ is quite the word: Hulme records in his lecture on poetry that modern verse is ‘read and not chanted’, intended by its author ‘to be read in the study’ (Hulme 2003, 64). The courtly bow of the tree threatens to impose or impinge upon the rural scene, and this is symptomatic of Hulme’s poetry, too: the new, original element in the analogy is frequently a token of urban life – a balloon, town children, a courtly bow – which is brought in line (or rather in distinct lines) with some rural or romantic image, such as a tree, the moon or the stars. Again, this is something the imagists would seek to capture, responding to the changing urban world around them but through connecting it to older, more rural images. Of course, in revealing the hidden connections or associations lying dormant within Hulme’s poems, a critic runs the risk of being accused of the charge of claiming as intentional what was merely fortuitous on Hulme’s part. Hulme wrote much of his poetry in a very short space of time. But this is not to say the composition of individual poems was rushed. Michael Roberts said of Hulme’s poems: ‘There is a story that Hulme wrote them all in about three minutes, to show how easy it was; but this seems to be belied by his manuscripts, which show very careful corrections and improvements’ (Roberts 1938, 17–18).4 An examination of his manuscripts reveals the various drafts of the same poems which he often undertook, and his poems exist in slightly varying forms from

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one publication to another.5 These revisions are often suggestive: as Alan Robinson notes, ‘In revising his poems Hulme eliminated similes, creating superposition instead of comparison’ (Robinson 1985, 79). The vast majority of Hulme’s slim output was probably composed in 1908–9; the earliest composition is thought to be the draft of ‘Sunset’ which Hulme wrote on the back of a hotel bill dated 26 May 1908 (Ferguson 2002, 50). The scale of Hulme’s poems  – small, precise, and surprising in their choice of subject-matter – is often reflected by the means by which they were composed: on hotel bills, or postcards (in the case of ‘Mana Aboda’), or as blackboard exercises (supposedly in the case of ‘Conversion’).6 These are texts already engaging with the real world, inscribed among the everyday, written onto the world as we see it around us. They are not devised as ‘things of permanence’ like the pyramids; they are fleeting observations about the world the poet sees around him, capturing individual moments (like much modernist literature, such as that of Joyce and Woolf as well as the imagists) and designed to be read in a moment. In virtually every sense the emphasis is on the miniature, the everyday, and, frequently, the disposable. The associations within the poems are made between everyday things, just as the poems were written on everyday items. And often it is this quotidian quality – the sense of their subjects having been somehow overlooked for so long by poetry – that gives them their new and exciting, yet oddly apt, quality as poetic metaphors. ‘Whitman had a theory that every object under the sun comes within the range of poetry’, Hulme reminds us in ‘Notes on Language and Style’. ‘But he was too early in the day. No use having a theory that motor-cars are beautiful, and backing up this theory by working up emotion not really felt. Object must cause the emotion before poem can be written’ (Hulme 2003, 56).

Dark tower It is through surprising associations, Hulme argued, that poetry can put the reader back in touch with the power of experiencing the world through literature. It is a peculiarly classical quality which the romantic attitude, with its emphasis on the abstract and the infinite, had eroded. Yet once again, he has to go to extremes in order to make his ardently classical attitude convince the

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reader. In ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ Hulme seized upon two lines from Cymbeline, describing them as ‘verse written in the proper classical spirit’: ‘Golden lads and girls all must, Like chimney sweepers come to dust.’ Now, no romantic would have ever written that. Indeed, so ingrained is romanticism, so objectionable is this to it, that people have asserted that these were not part of the original song. (Hulme 2003, 72)7

Hulme likes these lines partly because of the associations behind them: chimney sweepers do in a very literal sense come into contact with dust as part of their job, just as the flowers (dandelions) known in Shakespeare’s own Warwickshire dialect as ‘golden lads’ and ‘chimney-sweepers’ must decay into dust, like flesh-and-blood lads and girls.8 ‘Apart from the pun,’ Hulme goes on, ‘the thing that I think quite classical is the word lad. Your modern romantic could never write that. He would have to write golden youth, and take up the thing at least a couple of notes in pitch’ (Hulme 2003, 72). The word ‘lad’ strikes Hulme as less conventionally ‘poetic’, less idealized and idyllic in its view of the young, than the more sentimental ‘youth’. Indeed, the version of this essay which Herbert Read prepared for its original publication, in the 1924 volume Speculations, has ‘Golden lads and lasses’ (Hulme 1924, 121) rather than ‘Golden lads and girls’, thus heightening the emphasis on ‘lads’ over ‘youths’ in Hulme’s reading, and de-romanticizing the girls as well as the youths. A creative misquotation? If so, on Hulme’s or Read’s part? But even when the quotation is restored in the more recent editions of Hulme’s work containing this essay, so that it is closer to what Shakespeare actually wrote, there is still room for misquotation. As with his understanding of Coleridge, Hulme’s use of Shakespeare rests on a misapprehension and misapprehending of his source material. For what is also interesting about Hulme’s choice of these lines from Cymbeline is that his use of them is dependent on a misreading, or even several misreadings. First, through misquotation. For ‘no romantic would have ever written that,’ but neither did Shakespeare: Shakespeare has ‘As chimney-sweepers, come to dust’, not ‘Like chimney-sweepers’. While the difference seems slight, the word ‘Like’ in Hulme’s rendering of the lines pushes home the physical similitude or comparison that is being made between two physical objects.

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‘As’ presupposes an action (‘As chimney-sweepers do’) whereas ‘Like’ allows no such action (‘Like chimney-sweepers do’ would be unacceptably colloquial, and unheard of in Shakespeare’s time). So in Hulme’s rendering of the lines, the ‘chimney-sweepers’ are presented as passive objects whose only fate is to decay like everything else, animate or inanimate. They become more liable to suggest the dialectal dandelions than images of young boys with brushes, such as Tom from The Water Babies. As with Hulme’s own fragment (‘Old houses were scaffolding once / and workmen whistling’) this couplet from Shakespeare’s song is a memento mori, and imparts this message of inevitable decay through the comparison, in two separate lines, of two concise images. This is precisely Hulme’s thesis for his own poetry, as expressed in his ‘Lecture on Modern Poetry’: namely, ‘recording impressions by visual images in distinct lines’. But the couplet is not the whole song, of course. For the second way in which Hulme misreads the lines slightly – wilfully here, even if the first misquotation was unintentional – is by excising them from the whole song and treating them as a little self-contained couplet. Here again, he is echoing an opinion put forward in his lecture: ‘after the decay of Elizabethan poetic drama came the heroic couplet,’ but in picking out the closing couplet from Shakespeare’s poem he in effect scales down this historical development, showing how the writers of heroic couplets reacted against what had gone before, but without completely rejecting the forms or themes that had been present in the old style (Hulme 2003, 61).9 That is, he excises the couplet he best likes from Shakespeare’s play, and argues that this bears out his point. Such practices are ubiquitous among the poet-critic. F. W. Bateson seized upon poet-scholar A. E. Housman’s extraction of one line from Milton, ‘Nymphs and shepherds, dance no more’: The pathos of Milton’s six simple words obviously derives for Housman from the last two of them. As Shenstone had pointed out in the middle of the eighteenth century, ‘the words “no more” have a singular pathos; reminding us at once of past pleasure, and the future exclusion of it.’ But Milton’s injunction to the nymphs and shepherds was not, in fact, to stop dancing, but to ‘dance no more / By sandy Ladons Lillied banks’. The nymphs were only to transfer their dances from Arcadia to Harefield in Middlesex. [. . .] Housman’s tears came from taking Milton’s line out of its context and giving it a meaning it was never intended to have. By misreading Milton he has created what is essentially his own private poem. (Bateson 1950, 15–16)

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Christopher Ricks has written of this particular instance, ‘Housman’s “own private poem,” not surprisingly, resembles his own poems’ (Ricks 1984, 172). So, too, did Hulme create his own little private proto-imagist poem which he could use to justify his new theory of poetry. Among other things, Hulme’s writing makes us rethink the idea of the fragment, and how this essential modernist form can be used to transmit ideas in new ways. Not only this; in cutting or cherry-picking particular quotations from other poems, and creatively misreading them, he showed how criticism is often at its most innovative when it is also an act of re-creation. He creates his ‘own private poem’. But his own poem has drastically altered the sentiment expressed in the original. It might be productive, therefore, to view the fragment as a peculiarly critical-creative mode of expression: for in choosing to remake a poem or literary work in abridged form, the fragment or partial quotation points towards a reading of the original text which is both a critical interpretation of that text and a creative rewriting of it to suit the critic’s own ends. Another of Hulme’s fragments provides a clue to his conception of the Shakespearean fragment: Raleigh in the dark tower prisoned Dreamed of the blue sea and beyond Where in strange tropic paradise Grew musk . . . (Hulme 2003, 14)

There is a reworking of Browning’s ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ in Hulme’s first line, as signalled by both a phrase (‘the dark tower’) and the unusual reversal of the more conventional syntactical structure, so the verb is delayed until the end of the line. But Hulme is not merely drawing on or responding to Browning’s poem. For Browning’s title, too, borrowed from another: from Shakespeare’s King Lear. Child Roland to the dark tower came; His word was still ‘Fie, foh, and fum, I smell the blood of a British man.’ (3.4.176–8)

Hulme’s fragment contains, without direct acknowledgement, a subtle commentary on the nature of textual borrowing. For just as Browning

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had taken from Shakespeare’s play just one line with which to create his own poem, so Hulme reworks the Shakespearean fragment into his own. There are the various similarities to be found, for instance between the sounds of the names Raleigh/Roland, or in the fact that both Roland and Raleigh are connected by knighthood (Sir Walter Raleigh), or in the fact that, like Roland, Raleigh dreamed of finding another place. Hulme’s unrhymed quatrain, breaking off before it can form a complete stanza, nevertheless contains an odd discordance in the endings to the three lines that are completed, in ‘prisoned’, ‘beyond’ and ‘paradise’, as though the first word were a conflation or incarceration of the other two, suppressing or locking away any prospect of a paradise beyond the prison’s four walls. (‘Prisoned’ is a nice restricting or curtailing of ‘imprisoned’, just as prison is a curtailment of one’s freedom.) To consider what Hulme could do with others’ words in these fragments of his own is to throw light onto the way he uses such fragmentary quotations in his prose. Golden lads and girls all must, Like chimney sweepers come to dust.

For read in isolation Shakespeare’s words strike us as the expression of a glum sentiment that offers little or no consolation: we are all going to die, the words say, and you must respond to this message as you choose. But read in their context – at the end of the whole song, a funeral lament for Cloten and Fidele – the words advise a stoical approach to death, as to life: Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun, Nor the furious winter’s rages, Thou thy worldly task has done, Home art gone and ta’en thy wages. Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. (4.2.258–63)

The good thing about being dead, the song says, is that you no longer need to fear the hardships of life. Read in their even wider context – that of the whole play – the lines create a retrospective sense of irony. For Fidele, who has been buried next to Cloten, is actually the heroine Imogen disguised as a boy, and is not really dead; merely drugged. What Hulme did was to take these lines out

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of context in order to suggest their similarities to his own notion of ‘classical’ verse; but in doing so he was only highlighting that ‘romantics’ had previously done this, in seeking to cut the lines from the play. Hulme performed this act of fragment-making again in ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’, where it is Shakespeare’s great heir, Keats, who is subjected to quotation-mining: Creation of imagery is needed to force language to convey this freshness of impression. The particular kind of art we are concerned with here, at any rate, can be defined as an attempt to convey over something which ordinary language and ordinary expression lets slip through. The emotion conveyed by an art in this case, then, is the exhilaration produced by the direct and unusual communication of this fresh impression. To take an example: What is the source of the kind of pleasure which is given to us by the stanza from Keats’ ‘Pot of Basil’, which contains the line ‘And she forgot the blue above the trees’? I do not put forward the explanation I give here as being, as a matter of fact, the right one, for Keats might have had to put trees for the sake of the rhyme, but I suppose for the sake of illustration that he was free to put what he liked. Why then did he put ‘blue above the trees’ and not ‘sky’? ‘Sky’ is just as attractive an expression. Simply for this reason, that he instinctively felt that the word ‘sky’ would not convey over the actual vividness and the actuality of the feeling he wanted to express. The choice of the right detail, the blue above the trees, forces that vividness on you and is the cause of the kind of thrill it gives you. (Hulme 1924, 163–4)

‘I do not put forward the explanation I give here as being, as a matter of fact, the right one’: this disclaims rather than declaims, and the note of cautious defence was worth making. For once again, Hulme excises just the passage he needs, to create a one-line fragment from Keats’s original longer poem. Although misquotation is not an issue here, the issue of quoting out of context is an issue, or at least at issue: this line (from Keats’s poem ‘Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil’; again, Hulme curtails this and gives simply the subtitle) is part of a longer description: And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun, And she forgot the blue above the trees,

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And she forgot the dells where waters run, And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze; She had no knowledge when the day was done, And the new morn she saw not: but in peace Hung over her sweet Basil evermore, And moisten’d it with tears unto the core. (Keats 2003, 252)

For what the stanza reveals in its entirety is an attention to opposites: as with Shakespeare’s song from Cymbeline  – Hulme’s other great source of imagist fragment – Keats’s lines reflect how Isabella has forgotten everything, whether wind or water, night or day, evening (‘when the day was done’) or morning (‘the new morn she saw not’). She has not only forgotten the stars and moon, but also the sun and the blue sky – in other words, the ‘blue above the trees’ is meant to be paired with the stars, as the day’s equivalent to the night’s stars, just as the sun is the day’s equivalent orb to the night’s moon. If Keats had used ‘sky’ instead of ‘blue’ (Hulme’s contention), the lines would not have made sense. But where Keats’s lines reflect this balance and totality, Hulme’s one-line sample of them conveniently forgets this, and reflects merely the odd choice of ‘blue’ instead of ‘sky’. Indeed, the choice does seem odd, viewed out of the stanza’s context; read in context, the word-choice seems less unusual. Once more, Hulme hijacks the lines, or line, of a great poet from the past to suit his own revolutionary agenda for poetry.

Embankment Such acts of wilful close reading  – or misreading  – in Hulme’s critical and philosophical writing would serve to bolster imagism’s claims to freshness and hardness of image: precision and concision were to be the new bywords for Pound’s idea of modern poetry in 1912–13. But it is also Hulme’s reimagining of things as just that – things – which marks much of his poetry and would occupy the imagist poets such as Pound and H. D. in the years following the first publication of Hulme’s poems. Concrete objects are linked with other concrete things, and there is little room for the abstract. But there is another point to be made. For in his attempts to recast the French Symbolist ethos into what would later become the Poundian doctrine of the ‘image’, Hulme often writes poetry which is extraordinarily self-referential: he presents his poems

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not just as poetic statements in their own right, but as enactments of his theory about what modern poetry should be. Hulme’s poetry, then, is frequently metapoetic. This point is an important one, but it is one which is not often mentioned by critics of Hulme’s verse. This is clear in ‘Autumn’ and ‘Above the Dock’, in so far as they are enactments of his classicist doctrine, but other poems reflect and address the art of poetry itself. In many ways Hulme’s masterpiece is the following poem: The Embankment (The fantasia of a fallen gentleman on a cold, bitter night) Once, in finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy, In a flash of gold heels on the hard pavement. Now see I That warmth’s the very stuff of poesy. Oh, God, make small The old star-eaten blanket of the sky, That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie. (Hulme 2003, 2)

‘The Embankment’ is a poem which engages in the act of theorizing poetry itself: it self-consciously turns on the question of what poetry, or ‘poesy’, should be. ‘That warmth’s the very stuff of poesy’: this line signals Hulme’s intention to redraw the map of modern poetry, not just in his experimental prose pieces (which will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 4) but in his poetry, too. The poem is perhaps Hulme’s most eloquent statement of his poetic theories, and it is an extraordinarily self-referential piece. In this respect, the poem is like ‘Mana Aboda’ with its all of ‘the singing poets’, or this more enigmatic poem: In the quiet land There is a secret unknown fire. Suddenly rocks shall melt And the old roads mislead. Across the familiar road There is a deep cleft. I must stand and draw back. In the cool land There is a secret fire. (Hulme 2003, 5)

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The metaphorical road described here is presumably the road taken by Hulme the poet and Hulme the philosopher: he must ‘draw back’ from ‘the familiar road’ and, as Robert Frost would later write, take ‘the road less travelled’. A similar example is found in ‘A Prayer to the Moon to Smile (A Windy Night)’: this is no rhapsody on a windy night, but rather imagist experimentation, resembling, as Hulme himself said, ‘sculpture rather than music’ (Hulme 2003, 66). There is nevertheless a musicality to the poem, but it is one which – again – employs the poetic image of the moon and – again – addresses the question of writing poetry itself: Through the driven clouds The Moon As a queen with unmoved face doth watch Her dusky cavalry ride past In mad manoeuvres, Charging in mass, divide in swerving wings On either side the throne, Yet smiles she not at the show provided By Wind, Master of the Royal Masque. What is the grief doth fix your face, O Queen! in such immutability. Is it that I, a poor versemaker, In your royal presence walks unbidden And through the chinks, without payment, Steal a look! (Hulme 2003, 9)

For all of its mock-Tudorisms (‘with unmoved face doth watch’, ‘smiles she not’), this is decidedly modern: it seems self-consciously aware of its tenuous status as ‘poetry’ at the beginning of the twentieth century, with the ‘poor versemaker’ feeling unworthy to gaze at the moon because everything has already been said before, and said better, by others. ‘The Embankment’ is, as John Gage asserts, ‘a dramatic piece’ (Gage 1981, 148) which ‘dramatizes [. . .] the imagist experience of sudden insight from sense perception’ (148). In his 1917 essay ‘Reflections on Vers Libre’, Eliot quotes all seven lines of ‘The Embankment’, ‘because of their beauty’ – going

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on to say, ‘This is a complete poem’ (Eliot 1978, 185–6). But like Hulme Eliot’s own editorial mind came into play here, and created a ‘complete poem’ that was incomplete; for he neglects to include the (parenthetical) epigraph in his quotation of Hulme’s lines. The poem, in effect, becomes a fragment. The internal rhymes, running from that bracketed epigraph to the last line – those of cold, gold, old, fold – help to form a chain that unites the central images of the poem. For again we are presented with a contrast between past and present, but this time the poet’s ‘I’ invokes the different physical senses in order to draw the contrast between ‘Once’ and ‘now’: the poet’s speaker remembers finding pleasure in sounds (amply summoned through the alliterative and assonantal sounds of ‘finesse of fiddles’) and sights (‘flash of gold heels’), but now rejects these in favour of sensation (‘warmth’s the very stuff of poesy’). The form of ‘The Embankment’ is in many ways that of conventional poetry, as witnessed by the rhymes of ‘ecstasy’ with ‘poesy’, and ‘I’ with that final couplet joining ‘sky’ with ‘lie’ (though all five words have conventionally been rhymed in English poetry). Even ‘pavement’ faintly picks up on the sound of the title, ‘The Embankment’. Then there are the internal rhymes or echoes which perform their own form of inner music: the ‘gold’ of the ‘gold heels’ is destined to disperse into, respectively, the ‘God’ and ‘old’ of the succeeding lines, just as the former wealth of the ‘fallen gentleman’ has now given way to fruitless prayer (‘Oh God’) and a plea for shelter (any old blanket will do). But one of the most impressive aspects of the poem is the way in which Hulme condenses several ideas into a single image. Here the association is not based around simile, but expressed through the more direct conduit of metaphor. Michael H. Whitworth seizes upon the penultimate line: What is different from earlier lyrics is the compression of the phrase ‘the old star-eaten blanket of the sky.’ The phrase raises, first, the question of how the sky could be like a blanket, then of how far we are supposed to take the comparison of moth holes to stars, and then of how we are supposed to take the speaker’s invocation. So if there is something modern about the ending of ‘The Embankment,’ it is that the imagery leaves questions unresolved after the verse has formally concluded. (Whitworth 2010, 204)

But just because these questions are unresolved after we finish reading the poem this does not mean that they are altogether irresolvable. One thing

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uniting moths with stars is the fact that they are usually seen only at night, and are then associated with light; the poem does not ask us to observe this association, merely to see ‘star-eaten’ as breathing new life and warmth into the lifeless and fusty old cliché that is ‘moth-eaten’. The suggestion of the poem – again, what it says without saying – is that the speaker is homeless, the Thames Embankment having a long-standing association with homelessness. What this poem iterates, therefore, is the thesis that only what is essential to human existence makes good poetry. In other words, good poetry deals with the necessary and includes only what is necessary. Hulme pushes this point home by choosing ‘fiddles’ and ‘gold heels’ as the images with which he rejects sound and sight respectively; both are associated with luxury, with what is not necessary but merely desired. But warmth is something different: warmth is not only desired but needed for us to live. Elsewhere he wrote in a single-line fragment: ‘Religion is the expansive lie of temporary warmth’ (Hulme 2003, 16). The line turns on the double meaning of ‘lie’ meaning both to recline and to utter an untruth, since when one lies down, one expands and is expansive. But the lie of religion that Hulme perceives is so expansive because of what it promises: a warmth or reassurance that is so fundamental to human existence that it is found the world over. As Edwards remarks, ‘It goes without saying that God will not turn the sky into a moth-eaten blanket to warm the down-and-out gentleman’ (Edwards 2006, 35). That appeal, ‘Oh God’, is a vain request. ‘The Embankment’ appears to have begun life as a three-line fragment: Oh God, narrow the sky, That old star-eaten blanket, Till it fold me round in warmth. (Hulme 1921, 276)

This fragment, which appeared in The New Age in 1921 along with the other unpublished poems, was not reprinted in the Selected Writings. Another unreprinted fragment reads: ‘No blanket is the sky to keep warm the little stars’ (276). But it is important because it shows how ‘The Embankment’ evolved from a fragment into a longer poem, and how the central, fresh metaphor of the ‘star-eaten blanket’ in turn morphed into something more. The fragment and the eventual poem which sprang from it, ‘The Embankment’, call for a reduction of the heavenly, the vast, the ethereal (encoded by the image of the sky) to something as everyday, tangible, and manageable as a blanket. The blanket is more useful to

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the homeless man than the sky; it is no good, after all, admiring the stars if you are freezing to death on the London streets. We are all looking at the stars, but some of us are in the gutter, too. Particularly interesting is the evolution of the sentiment into the concluding couplet of the poem. Another early draft which eventually went into making ‘The Embankment’ was a couplet: Here stand I on the pavement hard From love’s warm paradise debarred. (276)

Hulme was right to reject the second half of this couplet when he composed the final poem: there is something a little too romantically familiar about a phrase like ‘love’s warm paradise’ (compare the infinitely more successful and strikingly original ‘strange tropic paradise’ from the Raleigh fragment). But ‘warm’ is the word on which the couplet turns, just as ‘warmth’ will be ‘the very stuff ’ of the eventual poem. A homeless man is so often without love as well as warmth. Pound may have had a hand in the evolution of the poem. Like Eliot’s The Waste Land a decade later, Hulme’s ‘The Embankment’ benefited in many ways from Pound’s editorial suggestions. Robert Ferguson considers the history of this poem: Much of the literary-historical interest around ‘The Embankment’ concerns the extent to which Pound was involved in its composition, specifically in the making of its second line. The version actually printed in The Book of the Poets’ Club had ‘the pavement grey’. By the time the poem reappeared in The New Age of 25 January 1912 this had evolved to ‘pavement hard’, and in the version printed as an Appendix to Pound’s Ripostes in October of the same year to ‘hard pavement’. Of these, ‘grey’ picks up ‘gold’, but does so weakly, while ‘hard’ shifts the reading weight back on to ‘heels’ but is too far removed from it. The right effect does not emerge until the reversal of the old-fashioned inversion. Several writers on Hulme have suggested that Pound was responsible for this improvement and that with ‘grey’ Hulme had been following Yeats in ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (‘While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey’) until the more modernist sensibilities of Pound prevailed. (Ferguson 2002, 59–60)

The reversal of the phrase so that ‘pavement’ is given pride of place at the end of the line may also have been a conscious effort to emphasize the vers libre element of the poem. (As will be discussed in the next chapter, it is surprising

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in some ways that Hulme did not choose to perform a similar trick with the word ‘comfort’ in the last line.) For although it was singled out by Eliot as an example of vers libre in English, ‘The Embankment’ is, in many ways, traditional in its form, right down to the concluding couplet. But ‘pavement’ stands out, while at the same time picking up a vague memory of the -ment in the poem’s title; it ends with a dying fall, a light stress. Furthermore, ‘ecstasy’ is picked up by ‘poesy’, just as ‘I’ rhymes with ‘sky’ and ‘lie’, and all are united by their -y if not their eye-rhymes. It is only ‘pavement’ and the fragmentary line ‘Oh God, make small’ which do not rhyme with anything. The pavement juts out and stands out, unable to provide the comfort the speaker needs, just as it is unable to provide comfort through rhyme (there is no perfect rhyme for ‘pavement’). For Eliot, the chief fault of ‘The Embankment’ was the final line: This is not a perfect poem, and the last line is definitely weak in construction. But, in the world of 1910 or so, this and a dozen poems one might choose from the work at that time of Pound, Richard Aldington, H. D., F. S. Flint, were evidence of a radical change in the whole practice of verse. (Eliot 1996, 389)

This poem of Hulme’s, and others like it, would have far-reaching consequences, not just for Hulme’s immediate circle  – Pound’s Imagistes  – but the course of modern poetry that would be played out in its wake, with its blending of rhymed with unrhymed lines, its tendency towards free verse, its treatment of the small, the trivial and the everyday, and its negotiation between the romantic and classical impulses which Hulme had played out so significantly in his own writing.

Blue sea In his attempt to rethink the ‘law of association’ governing poetry, Hulme experimented with numerous images: popular and established poetic tropes such as the moon, the stars and the sea. Hulme’s poem ‘Madman’ makes a lunge for the transcendent by bringing in the sea: Moan and hum and remember the sea In heaven, Oh my spirit, Remember the sea and its moaning. (Hulme 2003, 7)

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This remembers the romantic and post-romantic pathetic fallacy of the moaning sea, found in Tennyson’s ‘the moanings of the homeless sea’ (Tennyson 1987, 352) or Christina Rossetti’s ‘By the Sea’: Why does the sea moan evermore? Shut out from heaven it makes its moan, It frets against the boundary shore; All earth’s full rivers cannot fill The sea, that drinking thirsteth still. (Rossetti 2001, 185)

Rossetti has ‘sea’, ‘moan’, ‘heaven’ and ‘rivers’, while Hulme has ‘sea’, ‘moan’, ‘heaven’ and (earlier) ‘river’. This is not to suggest a direct chain of influence between Rossetti or Tennyson and Hulme, but rather to highlight the extent to which Hulme was inheriting these images from the ‘romantic’ poets of the nineteenth century. Yet even here Hulme transforms the image, for the first moan (‘Moan and hum and remember the sea’) belongs to the speaker’s spirit, and the second (‘Remember the sea and its moaning’) remembers the first. Thus the sea does not moan alone: pathetic fallacy is tempered by the more natural moaning of the speaker in the first line. Man and his surroundings are once again juxtaposed, but is this poem a romantic one or an escape from romanticism? Hulme is fond of the blue sea in his poetry. Like the moon and stars in ‘Autumn’ and ‘Above the Dock’, the sea is a perennial subject of poetry Hulme brands ‘romantic’ because of its vast expansiveness. Not only does Raleigh dream of ‘the blue sea and beyond’ but there is this fragment: Oh Lady – full of mystery Is that blue sea, beyond your knee. My dreaming languorous voyage take To where that same blue sea doth break In cambric surf all framed with lace On white strands far from this dull place. (Hulme 2003, 11)

This oceanic imagery again connects Hulme to the nineteenth-century poets, many of them ‘romantic’ in his sense of the word. But what makes Hulme’s response to the sea new and ‘classical’ in its approach is the emphasis on the specific and the small: the ‘lace’ which is likened to the surf or foam of the sea. (Cambric was often used to make lace handkerchiefs, and thus Hulme’s

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lines reduce the sea to the pocket-sized, much as ‘The Embankment’ called for the sky to be shrunk down to the size of a blanket the speaker could fold around him.) This poem is symptomatic of Hulme’s relation to the concept of allusion: unlike Eliot’s poetry, for instance, it is very difficult to pin down a particular allusion in Hulme’s poetry, and even while we may be aware that he is calling into play the writing of another poet, we often cannot draw a direct link between Hulme and his sources. Not so with T. S. Eliot. In 1961, Eliot defended himself against a charge of plagiarism in his poem ‘Cousin Nancy’: In one of my early poems I used, without quotation marks, the line ‘the army of unalterable law . . .’ from a poem by George Meredith, and this critic accused me of having shamelessly plagiarised, pinched, pilfered that line. Whereas, of course, the whole point was that the reader should recognise where it came from and contrast it with the spirit and meaning of my own poem. (Quoted in Ricks 2002, 98)

Eliot’s allusion relies on the literate reader picking up the origin of the phrase, and working out how Eliot is himself reworking the older phrase; but the point of these allusions in Hulme (if they can be called such) is not to engage the reader in a sort of spot-the-difference competition between Hulme’s poem and the earlier work. Rather he deliberately takes more general and universal earlier symbols and images from poetry and draws them wholesale into a new relationship with the modern world, so that moons and balloons, or oceans and lace, coincide. Like Eliot, he is a modernist poet drawing upon Victorian images and phrases, but unlike Eliot, he is interested in questioning and reinventing the stock images employed by those poets of the past, rather than engaging in specific instances of allusion and quotation. Such analysis may serve to suggest that Hulme’s short poems work in the manner of puzzles, where the reader is engaged in the task, not of likening Hulme’s phrase with that of another writer, but of ascertaining how the two images in the metaphor or simile are working together (and, just as importantly, why they work together). And, sure enough, there is something puzzling about the style of Hulme’s poems: more elusive than allusive, we might say. As J. B. Harmer states, ‘Sometimes in Hulme’s poems there seem to be echoes from other writers; but on closer examination their sources remain elusive. This contrasts with his prose, where he takes and adapts ideas and statements with often ruthless directness’ (Harmer 1975, 119).

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Take the example of ‘A Sudden Secret’, which appears to be more direct about its debt to the past. The poem seems to owe something to Matthew Arnold: Velvet sand, smooth as the rounded thigh Of the Lady of Avé, as asleep she lay. Vibrant noon-heat, trembling at the view. Oh eager page! Oh velvet sand! Tremulous faint-hearted waves creep up Diffident – ah, how wondering! Trembling and drawing back. (Hulme 2003, 5)

Does this respond to Matthew Arnold’s celebrated nineteenth-century poem written in quasi-free verse, ‘Dover Beach’? Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! Only, from the long line of spray Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land, Listen! you hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, At their return, up the high strand, Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in. (Arnold 1890, 212)

Hulme keeps some of the hallmarks of Arnold’s famous piece – the uneven line lengths, the recourse to exclamation marks and apostrophe (‘Oh eager page! Oh velvet sand!’), and the description of the waves over the sand  – but he rejects the rhyme scheme and the suggestion of excessive emotion found in Arnold’s poem. ‘The eternal note of sadness’: Hulme would not countenance such references to eternity and infinity. But he borrows many of the specific images and cadences from Arnold: ‘tremulous’/‘Tremulous’; ‘draw back’/‘drawing back’; ‘waves’/‘waves’. The purpose of this poetic exercise was evidently to draw on the images of Arnold’s poem and its description of the movement of the sea, but to transfer its significance from the vast, abstract idea of faith (Arnold sees the retreating tide as symptomatic of the ‘Sea of Faith’) to the altogether more physical and trivial phenomenon of a lady’s thigh.

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Imagism Hulme’s role as the originator of imagism in the two poems published in January 1909, ‘Autumn’ and ‘Above the Dock’, was a pivotal one. No study of Hulme’s poetry which aims to be comprehensive in its coverage can omit a discussion of his influence on the imagist movement. True, there were others who were exploring the same ideas borrowed from French Symbolism, such as Edward Storer, whom F. S. Flint cites in his 1915 article for The Egoist, ‘The History of Imagism’ (Flint 1915, 70). But it was the Poets’ Club and later Secession Club, behind which Hulme became the driving force, that led Pound to gather H. D. and Richard Aldington together and to label them ‘Imagistes’. As Pericles Lewis puts it, Imagism was the first organized attempt at a modernist school in England and the United States. The imagists’ emphasis on ‘direct treatment of the thing,’ their dislike of sing-songy or metronomic meters, and their avoidance of traditional poetic diction all prefigure the formal concerns of the later modernists, which were closely linked to their challenge to the legacy of romanticism. Pound’s friend T. E. Hulme called for a ‘hard, dry’ classical verse that would break away from the sentimentality of the late Victorian epigones of romanticism. Much modernist poetry continued to reject sentimentalism and to emphasize complexity. (Lewis 2007, 85)

This summary of imagism could well be a summary of many of the maxims of Hulme’s early writings, even before Lewis brings Hulme into the discussion. Hulme’s fragments, such as ‘Old houses were scaffolding once’ which was published posthumously in 1921, showed that poetry could be very short, shorter even than the Japanese haiku, yet still communicate meaningful ideas or emotions. Given the extent to which many of Hulme’s poems and essays prefigure the concerns of the later imagists, it is worth concluding this chapter on Hulme’s images with a re-examination of his role in the development of imagism. It has been established by numerous critics that Pound attended Hulme’s poetry meetings, and Pound himself, when he appended Hulme’s ‘Complete Poetical Works’ to his 1912 volume Ripostes, acknowledged that the imagists were descended from the ‘forgotten school of 1909’ which was Hulme and Flint’s Secession Club. He even refers to this club as the ‘School of Images’ (Pound 1912, 58–9). Perhaps the most celebrated of all imagist poems is Ezra Pound’s

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two-line piece, ‘In a Station of the Metro’ (1913), which equates the faces at the underground with petals found on the ‘wet, black bough’ of a tree (Pound 1971, 109). The central image of the faces as petals is clear and simple, and can instantly be visualized. But as with Hulme’s fragment there are assonantal echoes which help to give the words themselves a unity. Here it is worth bearing in mind that the poem is really not a two-line verse at all, since the title forms an integral part of the poem’s meaning and message. Indeed, like a haiku, ‘In a Station of the Metro’ is really a three-line poem. The modern urban setting of the couplet is lost if the title is not granted its rightful place as originating line of a poem for which the altogether more rural image of the ‘wet, black bough’ acts as a terminus. As with Hulme’s most famous poems, such as ‘The Embankment’, a chain of sound-associations forms a link between the images of the poem, and the urban and the rural find themselves juxtaposed. But the poem stays in the memory partly because of the frailty of the image which is being suggested: petals on a bough will not be there forever, just as the faces in the Metro a 100 years from now will not belong to the same people. Like Hulme’s poems, and like so much imagist verse, the poem is a memento mori. Imagism sets up a relationship, often a surprising one, between two things which are immediately comprehensible. Working in a similar way to a joke, an imagist poem desires an immediate response from the reader or listener; there is a formula which leaves something unspoken, an association which we must bring to the poem to make it succeed. But the criticism which imagism subsequently opened itself up to, in less technically proficient hands than Hulme’s, was that the poetry would become so trivial as to descend into platitudes: far from being strikingly original in its treatment of old themes, imagist verse would become trite, like a pithy cliché or a worn-out aphorism. Harold Monro had other objections. In the May 1915 special issue of The Egoist, which gave over an entire edition to the subject of imagism, he outlined what he saw as ‘the most conspicuous defect of Imagism’ (Monro 1915, 80): ‘In poetry, a new cadence means a new idea.’ Is one to believe that if one first design a poem, then the idea will be present by reason of the design? In their correct order these words should read: In poetry, a new idea means (better makes) a new cadence. (Monro 1915, 78)

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For Monro, the imagists tried too hard; they rejected the conventions of verse too readily, in an effort to set themselves apart from other poets of the time. One wonders what Hulme would have made of this. Through imagism we can glimpse one afterlife for a particular strand of Hulme’s thought: the ideas he had outlined in his ‘Lecture on Modern Poetry’ and ‘Notes on Language and Style’ a few years earlier. In the June 1915 issue of The Egoist, May Sinclair responded to Walter Monro’s criticisms of imagism which had appeared in the previous issue: For all poets, old and new, the poetic act is a sacramental act with its rubric and its ritual. The Victorian poets are Protestant. For them the bread and wine are symbols of Reality, the body and the blood. They are given ‘in remembrance’. The sacrament is incomplete. The Imagists are Catholic; they believe in Trans-substantiation. For them the bread and wine are the body and the blood. They are given. The thing is done. Ita Missa est. (Sinclair 1915, 89)

Such a distinction helpfully draws attention to the unusual way in which imagists  – starting with Hulme  – use metaphor, not as a method of merely likening one thing to another, but as a technique to bring both images into new, startling clarity. It also helps to draw a fine distinction between Symbolism and imagism. For as Pound and Hulme both acknowledged, for Symbolists the symbol merely stood in for something else, whereas to the imagists the image actually is something else. It is not enough to say that the moon looked like a balloon, but that it is a balloon  – not only because of the lunar word-association, because of the similarity in shape, but also because the moon way as well be a balloon, since it is about as reachable as a balloon. (In 1901 H. G. Wells may have envisioned the future world of 1969 that would see men on the moon, in his novel The First Men in the Moon; but Hulme and many of his generation were undoubtedly more sceptical.) Earlier in the article, Sinclair had written: ‘The point is that the passion, the emotion or the mood is never given as an abstraction. And in no case is the Image a symbol of reality (the object); it is reality (the object) itself. You cannot distinguish between the thing and its image’ (Sinclair 1915, 88). The word ‘passion’ here is tinged almost with religious, specifically Christian, significance. This is like the distinction between simile and metaphor. Imagism deals in hard, clear and – above all – direct links between images. To illustrate how imagism was subtly

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different from what earlier poets had done, Sinclair refers to excerpts from Dante, Milton, Suckling and Keats. The Suckling example is from ‘A Ballad upon a Wedding’: Her feet beneath her petticoat, Like little mice, stole in and out. (Suckling 2000, 318)10

This is not imagist, Sinclair asserts, because ‘he is only using imagery. The mice are not a perfect image of his lady’s feet, only a partial and imperfect image of their appearance’ (Sinclair 1915, 88). Undoubtedly, Sinclair is right. Even allowing for the faint etymological pun released by ‘little mice’ (‘muscle’ as derived from the Latin mūsculus, meaning ‘little mouse’, from the ancient belief that muscles resembled little mice running around under the skin), Suckling’s analogy is flaccid and feeble. It lacks sinew. What Hulme made of Suckling’s petticoat  – and whether he responded to it as enthusiastically as he did to Herrick’s – is not known, but Sinclair’s example, and her article in general, do help to bring more sharply into focus what Hulme’s earlier proto-imagist poems had sought to do. For Sinclair’s distinction shares more with Hulme’s philosophy than might first be apparent. In seizing upon the Protestant/Catholic divide to illustrate the difference between the Victorian poets and the imagists, she drew indirectly upon the Reformation, just as Hulme had implicitly called upon that religious revolution when marking the division between the religious and humanist attitudes: The first of these historical periods is that of the Middle Ages in Europe – from Augustine, say, to the Renascence; the second from the Renascence to now. The ideology of the first period is religious; of the second, humanist. The difference between them is fundamentally nothing but the difference between these two conceptions of man. (Hulme 2003, 210)

These words had been preceded by: The importance of this difference between the two conceptions of the nature of man becomes much more evident when it is given an historical setting. When this somewhat abstract antithesis is seen to be at the root of the difference between two historical periods, it begins to seem much more solid; in this way one gives it body. (210)

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But what sort of body? Corpus Christi? For the historical event which Hulme fails to mention explicitly, but which made possible the shift from the religious to the humanist attitude, was undoubtedly the Protestant Reformation; in giving people the opportunity to read the Bible in their own language, Protestantism helped to transfer religious power and significance to the individual believer, paving the way for an increase in Renaissance humanism in the process. But the shift from transubstantiation to consubstantiation, as Sinclair understood so well when seizing upon this analogy for imagism, represented a weakening of metaphor which had wider philosophical and literary repercussions. This certainly colours Hulme’s theory about the two historical periods, marked off rather vaguely by the ‘Renascence’. Hulme, influenced by Catholicism and specifically by the doctrine of original sin, wants to see a return to communion in a cultural and metaphorical (if not an ecclesiastical) sense.11 When Herbert Read observed of Hulme in 1924, ‘he knew very certainly that we were at the end of a way of thought that had prevailed for four hundred years’ (Read 1924, xv), he pointed not only to the Renaissance, but also to the other significant event that had occurred four centuries before: the year of Hulme’s death marked the 400-year anniversary of the start of the Reformation, when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg. In one sense, Hulme’s call for a return to the religious attitude and the doctrine of original sin represents a call for an important, if metaphorical, return to a Catholic way of seeing the world. Imagism is, in this figurative sense, neo-Catholic poetry. As Hulme would later write in ‘A Notebook’: The important thing about all this, which I hope to make clearer when I come to deal with its effect on literature – is that this attitude is not merely a contrasted attitude, which I am interested in, as it were, for purpose of symmetry in historical exposition, but a real attitude, perfectly possible for us today. To see this is a kind of conversion. It radically alters our physical perception almost; so that the world takes on an entirely different aspect. (Hulme 2003, 222)

When he wrote these words he had abandoned his work on poetry and modern art, and was interested in wider cultural and political questions, with the religious attitude superseding his earlier call for a new classicism. But as his words make clear, he had planned to return to literature at a later

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date. But the poetry he had himself already written highlights some of this. Like the conversion enacted in his earlier poem of that name, here there is a metaphysical position which, Hulme maintains, can alter one’s physical being. The speaker of ‘Conversion’ recounts how ‘beauty like a scented cloth’ was Cast over, stifled me, I was bound Motionless and faint of breath By loveliness that is her own eunuch. (Hulme 2003, 3)

The speaker is drugged with beauty as though beauty were chloroform; we are not far removed from the anaesthetic which Eliot would use to such great effect in the opening lines of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. For Hulme also draws this implicit link  – a sort of latent pun  – between aesthetics and anaesthetics, by likening beauty to a soporific drug which is used to reduce the all-too-human speaker to a weak and helpless state. If this is a conversion, then it is not one of soul-searching transcendence, but squalid and humiliating abasement to a force far more powerful than oneself: the speaker even uses the word ‘Ignominious’ for his unconscious state. In both Hulme’s poem and in the closing words of ‘A Notebook’ he would write a number of years later, there is an acknowledgement of the physical power of such a psychological or philosophical experience: in adopting the ‘religious’ attitude, one’s body is altered, or so it seems. The effects in the poem are in the use of language. How faint a rhyme do ‘cloth’ and ‘breath’ make, mimicking the failing consciousness of the speaker who uses these words; how deliciously does ‘bound’ hang over the end of the line, leaving us anything but certain – or ‘bound’ – to know what is to come next. What Hulme’s closing words in ‘A Notebook’ and the speaker’s story recounted in ‘Conversion’ share is an acknowledgement of this quasi-physicality of our philosophical convictions. In Hulme’s poems, the classical attitude is clearly present, and the speaker is flawed and weakened by his experience, not filled with boundless possibility. This can be connected to Sinclair’s point about imagists being Catholics in terms of their Eucharistic attitude to metaphor. For Hulme, adoption of the so-called religious attitude really does alter your body, just as the host is said physically to transform into the body of Christ. This is what poetry, and arguably philosophy, of the ‘romantic’ school had lacked. Whether conscious or unconscious, imagism developed many of Hulme’s

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philosophical convictions, taking them up and enacting them in its poetry. The restraint of much imagist poetry is of a piece with the classical spirit of Hulme’s writing. Hulme enacted such Holy Communion in his early verse. But Hulme’s poetry, such as ‘In the City Square’, also shows how the imagist ethos had already been developed in his own work: In the city square at night, the meeting of the torches. The start of the great march, The cries, the cheers, the parting. Marching in an order Through the familiar streets, Through friends for the last time seen. Marching with torches. Over the hill summit, The moon and the moor, And we marching alone. The torches are out. On the cold hill, The cheers of the warrior dead (For the first time re-seen) Marching in an order To where? (Hulme 2003, 7)

This is one of Hulme’s weaker efforts, with the repetition serving no real purpose (‘march’ and ‘marching’ resurface five times) and the form a little too loose, even by the standards of free verse. Yet ‘re-seen’ is a choice rhyme for ‘seen’, since it repeats it while at the same time highlighting the repetition: seen itself is re-seen at the end of a line, in that unusual formation, ‘re-seen’. That five-word parenthesis, ‘(For the first time re-seen)’, encapsulates and brackets off one of the most important ideas of Hulme’s writing about modern poetry: the idea of seeing something again, but as if for the first time. This would be the thrust of Pound’s three-word mantra, ‘Make it new’, whose ‘it’ acknowledges that there is an old thing which must be renovated and renewed. (‘News that stays news’, even while it cannot strictly stay new.)

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Michael Roberts highlighted the importance of Hulme’s mini-revolution in poetry, and the bittersweet nature of its afterlife: Since Hulme’s time some ‘neo-classical’ poems have been written: the poems of the Imagists, for example, did not deal with ‘important’ subjects, they made no display of emotion, they said nothing about the grandeur of man. For most readers, visual accuracy alone could not make up for the lack of regular metrical form and romantic emotion; and imagist poetry of this kind has had no lasting popularity; but the imagist discipline has certainly influenced modern poetry, and more and more people have grown to dislike romantic rhetoric. (Roberts 1938, 72)

That was in 1938. What Hulme helped to begin, and Pound and H. D. developed, later poets have made one of the most salient features of modern verse. Even a less directly Hulmean imagist than Pound or Flint, such as the American poet Amy Lowell, would encapsulate something of this restraint and knowledge in her poems, as in ‘Middle Age’ (whose very title carries suggestions of a weakening of the human subject): Like black ice Scrolled over with unintelligible patterns by an ignorant skater Is the dulled surface of my heart. (Lowell 1972, 90)

The images of the skater on the ice is itself compounded with the metaphor carried within the verb ‘Scrolled’, as if the lines have been both skated and written onto the speaker’s heart. But what are we to make of the speaker describing her heart as ‘black ice’? The poem is elusive, leaving much unsaid, but what can be ascertained is that, like Hulme’s poems, the images present humanity in flawed and complex terms. There is no infiniteness here. The role that imagism has played in the subsequent development of poetry – and arguably continues to play in the work of contemporary poets – is undoubtedly such a vast and important subject that it would necessitate the writing of a new book.12 However, what is at issue here specifically is Hulme’s role in the shaping of the course of modern poetry, and that is a difficult thing to quantify. Nevertheless, a few statements might be put forward. First, that not just modern poetry, but modernist fiction owes something to the kind of philosophy of literature which Hulme helped to clarify. I say ‘the kind of

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philosophy’ guardedly, because I am not suggesting that writers of modernist fiction were necessarily directly inspired by Hulme’s work (see my discussion of parafluence in the next chapter). What I am saying, rather, is that Hulme’s idea that a poem should convey a moment from life, from personal experience, which often brings the everyday in connection with the numinous, can be glimpsed in James Joyce’s idea of the ‘epiphany’ and Virginia Woolf ’s ‘moments of being’. Hulme’s philosophy of imagism is one of the earliest and clearest attempts to theorize such an idea for modernism: that literature should seek to represent individual moments of experience which are grounded in the everyday world while keeping one eye on the quasi-spiritual or more profound implications of such events. This is one afterlife, not of imagism as such, but of the philosophical ideas which underpinned imagism: the novels of Joyce and Woolf, among others, might be seen as ‘imagist’ in this sense. Indeed, Harmer, in his study of imagism, states that Ulysses is ‘maybe the greatest twentieth-century poem of the English language’ (Harmer 1975, 184). They are like tapestries on which Hulmean moments of juxtaposition have been woven, forming a continuous narrative but one punctuated with these ‘moments of being’. Here it is worth remembering that Joyce’s poetry appeared in the first imagist anthology; Joyce memorably described epiphany as ‘the whatness of a thing’, which comes close to Hulme’s notion of what poetry should do, although stripped of its more conservative limits.13 As Joyce has Stephen put it: The connotation of the word, Stephen said, is rather vague. Aquinas uses a term which seems to be inexact. It baffled me for a long time. It would lead you to believe that he had in mind symbolism or idealism, the supreme quality of beauty being a light from some other world, the idea of which the matter was but the shadow, the reality of which it was but the symbol. I thought he might mean that claritas was the artistic discovery and representation of the divine purpose in anything or a force of generalization which would make the aesthetic image a universal one, make it outshine its proper conditions. But that is literary talk. I understand it so. When you have apprehended that basket as one thing and have then analysed it according to its form and apprehended it as a thing you make the only synthesis which is logically and aesthetically permissible. You see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing. The radiance of which he speaks is the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing. This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the aesthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. (Joyce 1994, 395)

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Noon-Heat: Hulme’s Contemporaries

Hulme and Eliot Hulme’s earliest surviving literary effort appears to have been a short story which he wrote as a boy on five sheets of cardboard in a little book. The story involves a boy groom to a family, who accidentally falls on top of the daughter of his employers during an incident involving the family’s dog cart. The groom, Johnson, is dismissed by Sir Thomas, but manages to win back his job after he overhears some vagabonds planning to rob from his former employer’s house. The groom manages to gain access back into the house through impersonating, in almost Sherlockian fashion, the tramp whom he overheard plotting. He then impersonates the boy who let him into the house (who believed him to be the tramp), and waits for the real robbers to arrive, whereupon they are intercepted by Sir Thomas. The robbers are arrested and Johnson is reinstated as groom.1 The story reveals a possible boyhood enthusiasm for detective or adventure stories. (The hero is a young boy, who uses disguise and impersonation to foil the criminals.) When the adult Hulme, in ‘Notes on Language and Style’, describes ‘Creation’ as ‘remembrance of accidental occurrences noted and arranged’, he appends a parenthetical note: ‘cf. detective stories’ (Hulme 2003, 44). It is as if, for Hulme, the concept of association – which is at the heart of Hulme’s methodology for modern poetry – approaches the neatness of a detective story, where some surprising connection between seemingly unconnected events or images must be sought by the reader. When we get this connection, we ‘solve’ the poem. Thus the likening of the moon to the red face of a farmer, or to a child’s balloon, relies on having once seen these objects

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and having been reminded of the moon in each case. It is a case of making connections, of seeing associations where others see merely two disparate objects that are unconnected. And yet Hulme’s reading of Bergson would also show him how there was something that went beyond science, into the realm of art and emotion, in all true poetry – something which the scientist or mathematician could not analyse. The little story is also instructive not least because of the emphasis it places on disguise, on adopting a different persona, only to drop this new mask in favour of yet another. The boy – who may be the young Hulme’s own delegate in the story – impersonates one character only then to become someone else again, thus leading to an infiltration of the inner sanctum (the family’s house) and eventual acceptance, or re-acceptance, into the mini-society portrayed in the story. With literary biography it is always dangerous to draw too many links between the boy and the man, especially when so little is known about the psychology of the boy in question, as is the case with Hulme; but given the adult Hulme’s obsession with trying different voices and personalities (Aphra in ‘Cinders’, the various speakers of his poems, and the ‘North Staffs’ pseudonym adopted in his war writings), his fondness for founding and being at the centre of literary and philosophical clubs and his shifting allegiance to different philosophical and theoretical positions (Bergson, Worringer, Sorel), the story appears to play out this later development in a telling miniature scene. Hulme’s significance rests at least in part, not on his influence, but on his relationships with his contemporaries: the network of associates he built up, his championing of the work of abstract artists such as Jacob Epstein, his association with the Poets’ Club and the subsequent Secession Club, and his philosophical connections (Bergson was instrumental in getting Hulme reinstated at Cambridge in 1912). Many of these associations are dealt with comprehensively by Robert Ferguson in his biography of Hulme; what I am interested in here is showing how important Hulme’s poetic work was in helping him to develop his early beliefs and ideologies, and in exploring how the concept of ‘influence’ needs to be allied to a historicist reading of Hulme’s activities and associations, in a concept I call ‘parafluence’. But in order to understand Hulme’s place in modernism it is necessary to examine what we understand by the term ‘modernism’ if it is to be productively discussed alongside Hulme’s writing.

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Defining modernism has always represented a challenge. Pericles Lewis, in The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism, seeks to adhere to a monolithic interpretation of modernism, acknowledging that while there were in fact a number of competing ‘modernisms’ developing during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is nevertheless helpful to talk of a singular modernism for the sake of pinning the movement down: Modernism offered an artistic and literary response to a widespread sense that the ways of knowing and representing the world developed in the Renaissance, but going back in many ways to the ancient Greeks, distorted the actual experience of reality, of art, and of literature. The crisis involved both the content and the form of representation. That is to say, it concerned the appropriate subject matter for literature and the appropriate techniques and styles by which literature could represent that subject matter. (Lewis 2007, xviii)

This can be related to Hulme’s central thesis in, for instance, ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, where he argues that the Renaissance signalled a shift from the religious to the humanist attitude, and that humanism was the chief influence behind the romantic impulse. In seeking to review the suitability of subject matter for poetry, and in later calling for a return to the religious rather than humanist idea, Hulme can be said to fit Lewis’s broad umbrella term for modernism with reasonable neatness. It is almost too neat, one might say. Various critics have pointed out that it is difficult to draw a clear distinction between romanticism and modernism, and, consequently, between the ‘romantic’ attitude and Hulme’s anti-romantic stance.2 But Hulme’s specific place in, and influence on, the wider context of modernism have proved even more difficult to define. One could do worse than turn to the Encyclopedia of Literary Modernism for a concise summary of the matter: ‘Hulme’s contribution to modernism is twofold. In the first place he wrote some of the earliest of the kind of poems that were later called imagist; only Edward Storer was earlier in this line. In the second place, he developed an attitude to religion that precedes and closely resembles T. S. Eliot’s’ (Potter 2003, 186). But this does little to pin down Hulme’s influence to specific texts or instances. Since Eliot looms large in any discussion of modernist poetry, he seems a good starting-point in terms of reviewing Hulme’s place in the wider ‘movement’.

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Eliot wrote to Mary Hutchinson in 1919: ‘I am not sure whether you thought that Hulme is a really great poet, as I do, or not? I can’t think of anything as good as two of his poems since Blake’ (Eliot 1988, 311). The two poems Eliot probably had in mind were ‘The Embankment’ (which he quoted in his essay on vers libre) and ‘Conversion’ (which appears to have inspired Eliot’s own poem ‘The Death of St Narcissus’).3 Eliot would later write in a letter to Samuel Hynes, ‘I cannot remember reading any of Hulme’s essays in The New Age, and the first of Hulme that I read outside of the poems appended to Pound’s Ripostes, was in the volume entitled Speculations’ (quoted in Ferguson 2002, 65).4 Therefore he appears to have known Hulme’s poems – though not his prose work – during the period when he was writing some of his best poetry, prior to the publication of his first volume, Prufrock and Other Observations, in 1917. But this is not to say that Hulme’s poems directly influenced Eliot’s poetry in any significant sense, other than the possible link between ‘Conversion’ and ‘The Death of St Narcissus’. It is more constructive, perhaps, to think of these two poets as ‘concursors’, to borrow Nicholas Royle’s term: that is, writers who were exploring similar ideas at the same time, without necessarily having direct knowledge of each other’s work.5 Like my concept of parafluence, this example highlights that, even if it were possible to prove that Eliot was directly influenced by Hulme’s poem, it would still be disingenuous to make too much of even a clear chain of inspiration. Many of the modernist ideas associated with both men were available from numerous sources: philosophers like Bradley and Bergson, fellow poets and writers, in the pages of the New Age and similar magazines. The ideas which influenced Eliot also influenced Hulme; they had similar interests and tastes, and the ideas on which they drew (such as the poetry of the Symbolists, for instance) were ‘in the air’ at the time. What the occasional verbal links  – links, rather than necessary echoes  – between Hulme’s and Eliot’s poems show is that a number of modernist poets at this time seized upon similar sources (both admired Bergson, though Eliot was more a supporter of F. H. Bradley) and used the same tropes, ideas and models in their work, combined with a similar attitude to free verse (one that does not reject rhyme or traditional metre outright) and a sympathy for the classical or religious attitude. Nevertheless, there are tangible links. We know that Eliot taught Hulme’s poetry to his students during 1916–17: reflecting upon this experience in

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‘The Function of Criticism’, Eliot remarks that ‘the poems of T. E. Hulme only needed to be read aloud to have immediate effect’ (Eliot 1999a, 32). Influence remains a possibility, but parafluence is perhaps a more productive way of viewing the relationship between the poetry of Hulme and Eliot, because it reinforces the ways in which Hulme acted as a conduit for various contemporary ideas, bringing them together and redistributing them, making him the perfect focal point for the ‘modernist’ attitude of the time. An example of the interesting crossovers between the two poets’ work will help to clarify this issue. ‘If critics have been somewhat uncertain about Eliot’s debt to Hulme as thinker’, Ronald Schuchard notes, ‘they have almost totally neglected his debt to Hulme as poet. Eliot was teaching Hulme’s poetry as well as his philosophy in the Extension lectures’ (Schuchard 1973, 1090). According to Schuchard, ‘Eliot had clearly studied Hulme’s poems and verse experiments closely, and either he received the poems from Hulme himself, as previous evidence suggests may have been likely, or he got them from The New Age’ (1090). Indeed, Schuchard has elsewhere noted that Eliot had a copy of Pound’s Ripostes in his library; it was in that volume that Hulme’s ‘Complete Poetical Works’ were included, and it is the Ripostes which Eliot mentions in his letter to Samuel Hynes as having been the first place Eliot encountered Hulme’s work (Schuchard 1999, 64). I am not interested here in the question of whether Eliot and Hulme ever met; I am more interested in whether Eliot encountered Hulme’s poetry prior to the posthumous publication of Speculations, and all the evidence shows that he did. ‘Conversion’, being one of the five poems included in the ‘Complete Poetical Works’, was one of Hulme’s poems Eliot must have been familiar with: Light-hearted I walked into the valley wood, In the time of hyacinths, Till beauty like a scented cloth Cast over, stifled me, I was bound Motionless and faint of breath By loveliness that is her own eunuch. Now pass I to the final river Ignominiously, in a sack, without sound, As any peeping Turk to the Bosphorus. (Hulme 2003, 3)

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Hyacinths – which are found repeatedly in Eliot’s early verse, from ‘Portrait of a Lady’ through to The Waste Land – are another instance of the merging of a traditional romantic symbol (flowers) with a distinct classical association: Hyacinth was the beautiful boy of Greek myth who was loved by Apollo. Thus the physical object of the flower can carry connotations which gesture towards the romantic and the emotional, without having to state this emotion in the ‘romantic’ sense Hulme would find so distasteful. Eliot, who would himself undergo a conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in 1927, may have responded to Hulme’s poem and converted it: the suggested link between Eliot’s ‘The Death of St Narcissus’ and ‘Conversion’ is relevant here, since parts of ‘The Death of St Narcissus’ went on to appear in The Waste Land in 1922. And between ‘Conversion’ and The Waste Land the similarities are suggestive: there is a strong association between ‘Conversion’ and the ‘hyacinth girl’ passage from the first part of The Waste Land, ‘The Burial of the Dead’ (Eliot 1990, 64). There is an odd chiming or association between Hulme’s ‘time of hyacinths’ and Eliot’s ‘You gave me Hyacinths’ (64); between Hulme’s ‘Light-hearted’ and Eliot’s ‘heart of light’ (64); between Hulme’s ‘without sound’ and Eliot’s ‘silence’ (64). The breathlessness of Hulme’s conversion (‘Till beauty like a scented cloth / Cast over, stifled me, I was bound / Motionless and faint of breath’) seems to bleed into Eliot’s lines in the ‘hyacinth girl’ passage. No conclusive chain of influence can be proved; and yet the wider conclusions which can be drawn from such local similarities are suggestive. Both poets are choosing to present personal experience in a way which endeavours to tread a fine line, on the one hand presenting itself as unique, fresh and new, while on the other hand appealing to our common and universal sense of emotional understanding. These parallels point up the two most valuable things which Eliot would have taken from Hulme, given what we know about both writers: the striking form and style of imagist poetry, and the new anti-humanist or ‘religious’ attitude. Both poems highlight, through their concursory relationship (to develop Royle’s neologism), how numerous modernist writers sought to reject the expansiveness of romantic poetry and to return to a conception of man as limited and flawed: Eliot’s speaker cannot speak or see clearly, and Hulme’s cannot move or breathe, being stifled by beauty. Eliot’s speaker ‘knew nothing’ as he looked into the numinous, Dante-inspired ‘heart of light’; Hulme’s speaker, similarly, is seemingly stricken dumb by beauty. Both acknowledge their bodily

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or mental limitations. Eliot’s lines are considerably more multi-layered than Hulme’s, but there is no doubt about what the two passages are saying about what it means to be human. Surveying Hulme’s influence from the perspective of the late 1930s, Michael Roberts concluded that Hulme’s dislike of versified moralizing and Wardour Street poeticality was shared by Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, F. S. Flint, H. D., and other writers; and the Imagist movement, which they initiated and which has influenced English poetry for a quarter of a century, might well have developed without the help that Hulme gave it. Stephen Phillips’s Beautiful lie the Dead could be called an Imagist poem, but Phillips had nothing to do with Hulme or with the official ‘movement’. T. S. Eliot knew very little of Hulme directly until the Speculations were published in 1924; F. S. Flint owed more to a reading of the French vers-libristes than to any sympathy with Hulme’s ultimate intentions. (Roberts 1938, 208)

Although we can confidently assert that Eliot knew Hulme’s poetry – if not his political and philosophical writing – before 1924, Roberts’ general point is one worth echoing. The connections we find everywhere between Hulme and other modernist figures show that it was often not so much a case of modernism growing out of Hulme’s ideas, as of like-minded authors and thinkers reacting in a similar way to what had gone before. Hulme acts as a focal point for these various strands of modernism, but suggesting this does not nullify Hulme’s importance, nor his influence altogether. Eliot may have written his lines on the hyacinth girl in The Waste Land even if he had not read Hulme’s poetry, but Hulme helps to show why so many people chose to write poetry along these lines during the early twentieth century. Hulme is a literary-historical touchstone.

Misreadings William Empson had little time for Hulme’s view of poetry, and believed The Waste Land to be a product more of Eliot’s reading of Symbolist poets than the influence of the imagist movement, but he acknowledged the role the Hulme-Pound coterie had nevertheless played in the creation of the poem:

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Originally, the poem said that Eliot (or Tiresias) did not know whether the young man carbuncular was a small house-agent’s clerk or a culture-snob who claimed to have spent the day with Nevinson in the Café Royal; it was hard to tell the difference. But Pound had swallowed the nonsense of T. E. Hulme, who said that poetry must be concrete and definite, so this bit had to go. (Empson 1984, 199–200)

This conflates Hulme’s imagistic ideas with French and English Symbolism, showing how vexed an issue the tracing of literary influence can be: even such an eagle-eyed critic as Empson cannot draw a definite line between the two. Eliot was definitely more tangibly influenced by Symbolism than he was by imagism. But we cannot deny evidence of Hulme’s direct influence altogether. Hulme’s influence was wider than a simple attempt to draw a Hulme–Eliot comparison implies. Mary Ann Gillies notes perceptively: ‘Critics did not fully appreciate T. E. Hulme’s place in Modernism until after the posthumous publication of his writings in 1924 and 1929. Yet those involved in the literary scene early in the twentieth century knew of Hulme’s importance; they were willing to listen to his theories on art and to accord him the privileged position of leader of a new movement’ (Gillies 1996, 42). This acknowledges that literary influence so often travels beyond the page, into the social circles that various writers inhabit, whom they knew, whom they heard lecture and debate on the key artistic issues of the day. Through Pound, Eliot certainly read Hulme’s poems, as Eliot himself acknowledged. Among other things, Hulme found himself – or, perhaps more accurately, made sure he found himself – at the centre of a group of writers whose artistic and philosophical ideas were derived from thinkers such as Bergson. Bergson’s philosophical ideas played an important role in the formation of Hulme’s thinking (though the influence of the French philosopher would wane later on), and some of Bergson’s concepts slot readily into the philosophy that lay behind imagism. ‘When Hulme talks of intuition’, Michael Roberts observed, ‘he makes it the basis of poetry, whereas Bergson makes it the chief aim of metaphysics’ (Roberts 1938, 82). Bergson believed that reality is always distorted when it is depicted in abstract language, because reality is constantly in flux while concepts and ideas are more fixed and stationary. ‘In all the arts, we seek for the maximum of individual and personal expression, rather than for the attainment of any absolute beauty’ (Hulme

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2003, 63): so Hulme writes in ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’, anticipating one of the most persistent paradoxes of the Pound/Eliot strand of modernism that would develop in the ensuing decades, and one of the paradoxes of imagistic technique. The paradox concerns the relationship between the personal and impersonal: while Hulme’s poems present personal and individual moments of experience, the experiences they describe are obviously being offered up as universal, being generally recognizable among the reading public. There is often that same sense of detachment which would later be seen in the work of the imagist poets. Sanford Schwartz summarized this connection: Pound and Eliot, like Hulme, regard poetry as the presentation of immediate experience. But neither of them seems to possess a consistent view of experience. They seem unable to decide whether it is subjective or objective, or whether the artist’s rendering of experience is a form of personal expression or impersonal observation. (Schwartz 1985, 62–3)

The troubled romantic-classical binary identified in Chapter 1 highlights this: Hulme’s poems are obviously more than impersonal observations, but at the same time they are not outpourings of personal emotion either; they are restrained, but they are in touch with the emotional and the personal nevertheless. The first of Pound’s celebrated three tenets of imagism reads, ‘Direct treatment of the “thing”’, but to this he appended, tellingly, the words, ‘whether subjective or objective’ (quoted in Ferguson 2002, 64). Although much modernist fiction would come to be dominated by personal subjective experience – the Joycean epiphany, Woolf ’s ‘moments of being’, and a concern with the complex psychologies of individual characters  – other modernists, particularly poets, would be concerned with impersonality or even, in Eliot’s memorable phrase, ‘an escape from personality’ (Eliot 1999b, 21). Schwartz treats this paradox admirably, arguing, At times they [Pound and Eliot] describe experience as personal and subjective, at other times, as impersonal and objective [. . . but the] shift from one alternative to the other indicates neither confusion nor self-contradiction: Pound and Eliot employ two distinct but complementary formulations of the dichotomy between abstraction and sensation, each of which offers a different perspective on immediate experience. (Schwartz 1985, 63)

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But the point is that Hulme’s poetic practice and theory of modern poetry anticipates Eliot and Pound’s later use of personal and impersonal modes side by side, and the key to appreciating this is the poetry that Hulme wrote. Robert Ferguson sums up the Hulmean paradox: ‘One of the enigmas of Hulme’s personality is that while he could preach the anti-personality doctrines of classicism in art, politics and literature, his way of expressing these views was itself often very personal’ (Ferguson 2002, 39). But the enigma need not remain so baffling, when we consider Hulme’s poetry as an instructive illustration and foreshadowing of his ideas. Mary Ann Gillies remarks that ‘evidence of Hulme’s Bergsonian borrowings’ is ‘found in the presence of two key Bergsonian ideas in Hulme’s remarks about literature. The first is Bergson’s notion of intuition; the second is Bergson’s contention that art is the presentation of living moments in a precise, ordered form  – requiring, in literature, a mastery of language’ (Gillies 1996, 44). It was through his Bergsonian phase that Hulme would come to influence modernism in the most direct way. His poetry, and his poetic theory, rely heavily on these two central ideas of intuition and the concrete linguistic representation of ‘living moments’. Such tenets would also be followed by the later imagists, whose engagement with their surroundings is often strikingly personal, capturing a moment from lived experience. Although they often sought the detached perspective, many imagist poets, as Andrew Thacker has recently shown, chose to depict emotions ‘by means of highly concretized images and a typically Imagistic use of simile’ (Thacker 2011, 96). Joan Copjec summarizes the importance of Bergson’s thought on literary modernism: For Bergson, the artist was one who was free of the necessity to view the world in terms of its practical utility and thus capable, through the unique qualities of his or her perception, to ‘create’, i.e. to modify phenomenal reality through the active engagement of mind. Art, then, was thought to occupy an aesthetic realm separate from that of the everyday. The ‘postmodern’ attention of art and literature to the textual practices of everyday life and the erasure of absolute boundaries between the ‘scientific’ and the ‘artistic’ text, signal, in this respect at least, a waning of the influence of Bergsonianism. The writings of T. E. Hulme are useful in making clear this relation of Bergson to modernism. (Copjec 1993, 245)

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Hulme is, in this sense, a bridge leading us from Bergson’s rigid distinctions – between science and art, between the everyday and the extraordinary – to the modernist literature which sought to erase such artificial distinctions. Bergson’s separation of the everyday from the artistic is certainly at odds with Hulme’s poems, which were written at a time when he was beginning to discover Bergson’s writing. This apparent paradox in his thought is worth considering for the light it sheds on the triangle of Bergson, Hulme and modernism. It is as if Hulme, through his development  – or even misappropriation  – of Bergson, helped to make this later strand of modernism possible. For how can we reconcile Hulme’s poetry of the everyday with Bergson’s idea that the artist is separate from the everyday? The poetry offers a new way of reflecting on Hulme’s relationship to Bergson, which has been covered exhaustively in the field of Hulme studies. But the poetry is usually left out of this discussion, or else treated as a minor prologue that ushers in discussions of the weightier prose works. However, the poetry forces us to question Hulme’s theoretical complexities more directly. Matthew Gibson has recently demonstrated how Hulme’s thinking was paradoxical in part because he drew on the work of both Bergson and William James. In The Principles of Psychology (1890), James had drawn a useful distinction between Romantic and Classical art, and Gibson highlights how Hulme was indebted to James’s distinction when formulating his own theory in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’. However, James’s distinction is somewhat incongruent with Bergson’s own ideas, ideas which influenced Hulme at this time. ‘This lack of complete congruence with Bergson’s entire theory,’ Gibson writes, ‘and Hulme’s apparent ignorance of the difference when transposing James’s ideas, was to have contradictory repercussions for the Imagist movement, since Hulme’s writing of this period clearly affected the practice of Imagist poets’ (Gibson 2011, 275). As a result of this error in his thinking, Hulme actually succeeded in reconciling a latent incompatibility between Bergson’s thinking and modern poetry. Gibson does not consider Hulme’s own poetry in his article, and so this discussion might be considered a necessary supplement to the illuminations Gibson shines on Hulme’s philosophical writing. As Gibson frames it, Hulme’s borrowings from William James’s concepts do no more than help to subvert his own idea that ‘dry, hard, classical’ poetry can actually promote

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aesthetic emotion. This is because James, when himself defining Classical art in the Principles of Psychology, insisted that aesthetic emotions are not fundamentally different to other emotions found in life and are also congruent with sensations – a view utterly refuted by Bergson. (Gibson 2011, 277)

For Bergson, the poet’s or artist’s experience is on a higher plane than that of everyday experience; not so with James. This James-Bergson anomaly has also been addressed by Sanford Schwartz, who notes that Hulme’s ‘description of Bergson’s philosophy is to a certain extent a misreading of the original. In the process of explicating Bergson, Hulme often sounds as if he is discussing James or Nietzsche’ (Schwartz 1985, 52). For Frank Kermode, one of Hulme’s key roles in the history of modernism was as a sort of re-brander. He was the one who gave Symbolism a new set of clothes, Anglicized it for his peers and prepared it for use by the modernists: ‘Hulme hands over to the English tradition a modernized, but essentially traditional, aesthetic of Symbolism’ (Kermode 1966, 121). He was not alone in highlighting the extent to which the ‘Imagist’ thought of Hulme’s writing was indebted to the French Symbolists. As Peter Howarth has recently argued in The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry, When we speak of the origins of modernist poetry, it is usual to mention T. E. Hulme’s Poet’s Club and Secession Club, two small circles meeting in London in 1908 and 1909 to experiment with very short poems in free forms, in reaction to the pompous, imperial stuffiness of Edwardian verse. But, as Hulme’s ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’ illustrates, they were updating and adapting the free verse and disjunctive syntax of the nineteenth-century French Symbolists such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, whose evocative, opaque technique was originally a search for mystical spiritual unity in reaction to the materialist, stratified culture fostered by French royalty after the traumatic Franco-Prussian war and the Paris Commune. (Howarth 2012, 12)

J. B. Harmer discusses the influence of the French Symbolists on imagism at great length in his book on the imagist movement; among other things, his study highlights just how many people were involved in the emergence of imagism and the establishment of free verse in English poetry. Kermode would famously take Hulme to task over his gross misrepresentation of literary and philosophical history:

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Whenever Hulme generalizes about historical periods he goes wrong. The critique of satisfaction apparently fails to distinguish between Descartes and Schopenhauer, and it tells us that Hartley and the later Coleridge were seeking the same answers. It is impossible to understand how anybody who had read the Essay on Man could possibly regard Pope as exempt from the heresy (which Hulme called ‘Romantic’) of denying the absolute inaccessibility of ethics to the reason; Pope’s trace of scepticism has very little to do with the chilly fideism of Hulme, and he has far more of Montaigne than Pascal in him. Much more important than the numerous minor objections of this sort that one could bring against Hulme is the well-established fact (ably presented in Michael Roberts’s book) that he disastrously misrepresents Romantic philosophy. For Hulme, as we have seen, Romanticism was a calamity however you looked at it: politically, philosophically, aesthetically. It was the anthropocentric assumption of the Renaissance at the stage of mania, all Rousseauistic rubbish about personality, progress and freedom, all a denial of human limit and imperfection. (In fact it would be truer to say that the movement was obsessed by Original Sin than to say, as Hulme does, that it completely ignored it, and made life the measure of all values.) (Kermode 1966, 125–6)

My argument here is that Hulme’s misunderstanding – whether inadvertent or actively wilful – of Bergson’s philosophy is what makes his particular theory of modernism possible: it is only through rewriting or at least misreading Bergson that he can synthesize his new theory about modern art and poetry founded on ‘classical’ models. But, as critics such as Kermode, Schwartz and Gibson have shown, Hulme’s misreading of Bergson creates a classical theory of poetry that also verges on the ‘romantic’ in the sense that he understands that term: it sees the transcendent in the everyday, rather than following Bergson in seeing the everyday as inadequate for the zone of the poet. To understand Hulme’s misreading, we must involve the poetry in our discussion, since it shows his theories already put into practice, suggesting how modern poetry could disengage itself from the excesses of the Edwardians. Like the misquotation of the lines from Cymbeline, which Hulme excises from the original song and transforms into a self-sustaining couplet, Hulme misreads the poetry of others in order to fit into his own denunciation of romanticism and championing of classicism (later the religious attitude). But his poetry also shows how his inadvertent fusing of Jamesian and Bergsonian ideas presented

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one way in which the classical mode might be used for poetry, albeit with a romantic flavour thrown in for good measure: Oh, God, make small The old star-eaten blanket of the sky, That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.

These concluding lines from ‘The Embankment’ show that, although the speaker may fulfil Hulme’s classical criteria by being a flawed and limited human being (a ‘fallen gentleman’, as the poem’s parenthetical subtitle has it), he is nevertheless using rhetorical and emotional appeal, and a recourse to traditional rhyme, to make the poem conclude satisfactorily. The poem would have been bolder, and even more in line with his classical philosophy as stated in the essays, if Hulme had evaded the rhyme: The old star-eaten blanket of the sky, That I may fold it round me and lie in comfort.

The falling-off of the unstressed final syllable of ‘comfort’ would have better captured the dwindling hope of the speaker, the sense that he is ‘spoilt by circumstance’ and destined not to be saved by divine intervention from his fate. The dying away of ‘comfort’ would also have been more restrained, more flawed – in a word, truer to the ‘classical’ mood being communicated. Instead there is a firm, strong end to the line, and to the poem, which belies the hopelessness of the situation. In other words, Hulme cannot bring himself to relinquish the comfort of that final rhyming couplet; his decision to end the poem in this way gives the lie to his classical convictions, which are connected to his commitment to free verse. It might be said that Hulme did not develop his classical beliefs until 1911–12, around the time when he composed his essay ‘Romanticism and Classicism’. But as ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’ from 1908 shows, he was already of the belief that modern poetry should be restrained when he wrote his own poems. This chapter has touched upon Hulme’s influence, as though it were an easily measurable phenomenon that could be shown clearly and cogently; but the issue of influence  – Hulme’s influence on imagism, for instance  – can be a hard thing to quantify. Hulme himself was aware that ‘influence’ is often a far more complex and multifaceted force than our use of that word

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commonly conveys. In a review of Tancrede de Visan’s L’Attitude du Lyrisme Contemporain, he drew a connection between Bergson’s reaction against the psychology of Taine and Spencer, and the Symbolists’ response to the Parnassian school: The Symbolist reaction against the Parnasse is exactly the same reaction in a different region of thought. For what was the Parnassian attitude? It was an endeavour always to keep to accurate description. It was an endeavour to create poetry of ‘clear’ ideas. They employed always clear and precise descriptions of external things and strove by combinations of such ‘atoms of the beautiful’ to manufacture a living beauty. To the Symbolists this seems an impossible feat. For life is a continuous and unanalysable curve which cannot be seized clearly, but can only be felt as a kind of intuition. It can only be got at by a kind of central vision as opposed to analytic description, this central vision expressing itself by means of symbols. M. Visan would then define Symbolism as an attempt by means of successive and accumulated images to express and exteriorize such a central lyric intuition. This is the central idea of the book, and the working of it out in the detailed study of the poets of the movement is extremely well done. It is very interesting to see how a complex thought like that of Bergson should be unconsciously anticipated and find a tentative expression in a purely literary movement. (Hulme 1911, 401)

Once more, we have a suggestion of what we might call the parafluential: the Symbolists seemed to have ‘unconsciously anticipated’ Bergson, having hit upon the same principle but in a different discipline. Here Hulme consolidates his own theory – that what Bergson made possible in philosophy was also being independently developed in poetry  – through reference to the Parnassians, whom he also singled out for special mention in ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’: ‘The particular example which has most connection with what I have to say is that of the Parnassian school about 1885: itself beginning as a reaction from romanticism, it has come rapidly to decay; its main principle of an absolute perfection of rhyme and form was in harmony with the natural school of the time.’ Overall, however, ‘they confined themselves to repeating the same sonnet time after time, [and] their pupils were lost in a state of sterile feebleness’ (Hulme 2003, 61). Influence becomes a matter, not of individuals, but of whole movements and moods.

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The anxiety of parafluence As has already been established, it is often difficult to prove, in any meaningful sense of the word, that one writer was directly influenced by another at a certain time. The more general we render the terms, the easier it becomes. We can pronounce with certainty, for instance, that T. S. Eliot was influenced by Dante. We have Eliot’s essay on Dante and the other critical writings where he references the poet; we have his notes to The Waste Land where he points up some of the specific allusions he makes to Dante in that poem; and we have the section of ‘Little Gidding’ which, in its earlier draft, mentions a character from Dante’s own poetry, Ser Brunetto, by name. But when it comes to talking about writers who were alive at the same time, the matter of influence sometimes becomes more, rather than less, difficult to resolve and becomes a matter of broader historical interactions and associations. Michael Levenson remarks: ‘It may be true, as a biographer has held, that “there is scarcely an argument or instance in Hulme’s writing” that does not derive from someone else. But that does not diminish Hulme’s interest. Indeed, he turns out to be interesting just insofar as he is derivative, just insofar as he submitted himself to a range of influences not previously conjoined’ (Levenson 1984, 38–9). Herbert Schneidau argued that Hulme’s influence on Pound was minimal, and Pound himself, later in life, remarked: ‘The critical light during the years immediately pre-war in London shone not from Hulme but from [Ford Madox] Ford.’6 The debate about influence continues. Scholars of modernism have often questioned the precise nature of Hulme’s influence on Eliot and Pound. If Eliot seems at first glance, along with Pound, the writer who was most directly influenced by Hulme, and we now realize we have cause to doubt even that influence, then what exactly is Hulme’s value as a writer and thinker? This is why I propose the idea of parafluence rather than influence for the case of Hulme, and for modernism more generally. Parafluence does not deny the possibility of direct influence, but rejects the idea that influence can always be corroborated to a satisfactory degree. Such attempts to draw clear links between one writer and another, besides, largely miss the point. Even in cases where one writer knew another, as with Pound and Hulme, it may not be apparent even to Pound the extent to which he was or was not under Hulme’s influence. But parafluence acknowledges the similar circles

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in which such thinkers moved, the similarities in the reading they did and the crossovers in their attitudes towards the trends and ideas of the time (as with, for instance, Hulme and Eliot’s differing but nevertheless similar views on religion).7 Parafluence is perhaps the most accurate and useful metaphor for modernism, or rather modernisms: it acknowledges that, although much of modernism was born out of a reaction to nineteenth-century ideas (realism, Positivism, romanticism), the issue of ‘influence’ is often one that is fraught with dangers for the scholar, and any talk of influence must acknowledge its multifarious nature. Hulme himself spoke of this kind of cultural flow of ideas, in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’: ‘Your opinion is almost entirely of the literary history that came just before you, and you are governed by that whatever you may think’ (Hulme 2003, 73). Parafluence is reaction, reaction against what has gone directly before. The title of this section, ‘The Anxiety of Parafluence’, is intended as a riposte to, but also an extension of, Harold Bloom’s concept of ‘the anxiety of influence’. Bloom’s theory states that a poet is often engaged in an Oedipal struggle with another poet (Tennyson with Keats, for instance), and the newer poet must free himself from this powerful paternal influence if he is to become an original poet in his own right. Something parallel but distinct is being offered here. Modernist poets and thinkers often sought to escape from their forebears – the Victorians and the derivative Edwardians, chiefly – through a sort of collective unconscious, whereby many writers, artists and philosophers working independently hit upon similar ways of reacting against the past, a convergent evolution of thought.8 This can be seen right from the start of the history of the imagist movement, as F. S. Flint noted in his piece for The Egoist in 1915, ‘The History of Imagism’. After recounting how Hulme had proposed the founding of a Poets’ Club,9 and the publication of the ‘plaquette’ titled ‘For Christmas MDCCCCVIII’ (which included Hulme’s poems ‘Autumn’ and ‘Above the Dock’), Flint writes: In November of the same year [presumably Flint means 1908, although ‘For Christmas MDCCCCVIII’ was not in fact published until January 1909], Edward Storer, author already of ‘Inclinations,’ much of which is in the ‘Imagist’ manner, published his ‘Mirrors of Illusion,’ the first book of ‘Imagist’ poems, with an essay at the end attacking poetic conventions. (Flint 1915, 70)

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Flint himself would echo Hulme’s standpoint on the language of poetry when, in a draft for a lecture, he wrote: ‘One of the chief functions of a poet is to create and recreate his native language, to invent new metaphors and turns of speech, to take dead words and put fresh life into them. But time is ungrateful to him, because his new speech becomes common speech . . .’ (cited in Harmer 1975, 157). As Flint makes clear in his (albeit hazy) history of the movement, imagism was inevitable in 1908–9. Hulme was just one of many writers who had done the required reading, had the right philosophical leanings and had the ability to draw people together so they would listen to him. He may have had influence, but he moved in circles that we might call parafluential, where many other like-minded individuals were also formulating a similar reaction against the poetry being published at the time – and, indeed, much of the poetry that had been appearing for the last 100 years. Pound’s later metaphor of the whirlpool, which was at the centre of the Vorticist movement, is an apt analogy: Hulme was the eye of the storm, the centre of the maelstrom, and others gravitated towards him but also moved outwards from him, troubling and complicating any linear model of ‘influence’. Like Pound, Storer looked to Japanese forms such as the haiku, ‘in which an image is the resonant heart of an exquisite moment’ (Flint 1915, 70). Like Hulme, he had an interest in the hard, concise nature of verse which Hulme prescribed as the form modern poetry should take. Although these poets knew each other at this time, it is not clear who influenced whom. Rather they were all working against the same thing – the feeble, derivative, metrically regular poetry being published at the turn of the century – and shared similar ideas about what the new poetry should be. J. B. Harmer has said of Storer: ‘Before the initiation of the meetings at the Tour d’Eiffel he was advocating and practising free verse, brevity, and selective use of impressions as the means by which poems should be written’ (Harmer 1975, 28). And of another poet, Joseph Campbell: ‘The independence of Campbell’s work is worthy of notice. It is almost certain that “Darkness” was written before the meetings at the Tour d’Eiffel. Hulme’s group did not meet before the last days of March 1909. The Mountainy Singer [Campbell’s volume of verse] was published in July’ (Harmer 1975, 26). As John Gage sums this up in his study of imagism, ‘The question of direct lines of influence has been the subject of historians of the movement, and need not be mine here: Chronology

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is not so much an issue for this study as are shared assumptions about poetic technique’ (Gage 1981, 8). Parafluence takes such connections and possible borrowings into account. It is a particularly timely concept, given the historicist turn that modernist studies has taken in the last few years, with its emphasis on multiplicity, and its rejection of the idea of one monolithic idea of modernism among the diverse proponents of the movement. Similarly, it is perhaps more productive to talk of ‘imagisms’ rather than imagism, for many poets of the time who were not part of the imagist movement proper – Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence, for instance – were at one time or another associated with imagism by Pound and others.10 As T. S. Eliot remarked, A poet cannot help being influenced, therefore he should subject himself to as many influences as possible, in order to escape from any one influence. He may have original talent: but originality has also to be cultivated; it takes time to mature, and maturing consists largely of the taking in and digesting various influences.11

Given the multifarious influences to which most artists expose themselves in order to cultivate their own style, it is hardly surprising that it should become difficult in some cases to talk of one poet influencing another in a particular instance. This would not be to deny that influence is often occurring; parafluence works alongside influence. It takes into account the ways in which ideas are often in the cultural air of a writer’s particular environment, and available, albeit in slightly different forms, from a number of places. Eliot’s poetry, for all of its associations and sympathies with Hulme and the imagist movement, appears to have developed in those formative years independently of imagism. Another movement which developed independently of imagism, but would echo many of its central tenets but in a different literary form, was the fiction of James Joyce. Stephen Dedalus’s speech in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) demonstrated how, for Joyce, the emphasis was on capturing ‘the whatness of a thing’, but Joyce’s previous book, Dubliners (1914), had shown the extent to which Joyce’s vision of modern fiction chimed inadvertently with Pound and Hulme’s new perspectives on poetry. When Pound reviewed Dubliners in, he effectively praised Joyce for effecting in prose what he had sought to portray in verse:

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Mr. Joyce writes the sort of prose I should like to write were I a prose writer. He writes, and one perhaps only heaps up repetitions and epithets in trying to describe any good writing; he writes with a clear hardness, accepting all things, defining all things in clean outline. (Quoted in Yee 1997, 21)

Joyce had begun work on the 15 stories collected together in Dubliners – which, with the exception of ‘The Dead’, run to just a few pages each – at least 10 years before their eventual publication, so he was developing these ‘imagist stories’ at the same time as Hulme was reinventing poetry. Something of this idea of parafluence or convergent literary evolution was eloquently expressed by one of Eliot’s greatest critics, Hugh Kenner, who mused upon the similarities between The Great Gatsby and The Hollow Men: In Chapter II of The Great Gatsby we read of ‘a valley of ashes,’ a ‘gray land’ above which brood ‘the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg,’ blue and gigantic, their retinas one yard high. There is no point in asking Mr. Eliot whether this is a source for The Hollow Men, because The Hollow Men was finished just before The Great Gatsby existed for Eliot to read. Nevertheless The Hollow Men appropriates the valley of ashes and the eyes of Doctor Eckleburg once the two works have entered the same consciousness, and become members of our present, which is an awareness of things that were never aware of each other. (Kenner 1965, 50)

The grey land and the valley of ashes was evidently part of the postwar mental landscape which both writers had locked in their heads. Such is the nature of parafluence, which gives a name to such influence-that-is-not-influence. It is an important part of historicism, a field which is particularly pertinent to modernist art, literature and philosophy, since so many individual artists and thinkers reached similar conclusions about the world around them at the same time. Parafluence flows into Randall Stevenson’s assessment of modernist fiction: Along with so much contemporary art, modernist fiction changed radically in structure and style because the world it envisaged changed radically at the time, as indeed did means of envisaging it. Analogous innovations in so many contemporary art forms may have arisen not from mutual influence – Joyce did not restructure his work only because contemporary painters had done so, nor vice versa  – but from common apprehension of the shifting

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nature of life, and of methods of perceiving it, in the early twentieth century. In other words, if contemporary novelists ‘changed everything’ in their work, as Thomas Hardy suggests, it would be reasonable to suppose that this was simply because they perceived everything around them as changed – even, in Woolf ’s view, human character itself. (Stevenson 1998, 8–9)

Similarly, Lionel Trilling rejects the kind of attribution of influence which gives precedence and priority to the philosopher over the poet. Such a caveat as this is worth bearing in mind when considering Hulme’s relationship with Bergson: we need, Trilling argues, to ‘question the assumption which gives the priority in ideas to the philosopher and sees the movement of thought as always from the systematic thinker, who thinks up ideas in, presumably, a cultural vacuum, to the poet who “uses” the ideas “in dilution”’ (Trilling 1951, 190–1). Such is the case with Hulme: Pound may have lamented that Hulme filled his evening conversations with ‘crap like Bergson’, but, as Matthew Gibson and others have shown, Hulme’s philosophical beliefs were influenced by others at this time, notably William James and possibly Nietzsche.12 Stevenson is right to mention modernist art alongside literature of the movement, and it might be productive to conclude this chapter by drawing together Hulme’s theory of poetry with his art criticism, to show how they share many crucial elements. More specifically, it is worth considering Hulme’s art criticism and its importance to modernist art, not merely because Hulme’s ideas concerning the nature of the poetic image are so bound up with visual art and sculpture, but because his art criticism might be viewed as a necessary supplement to his earlier writings on poetry. Although the Hulme who championed Epstein in 1913 was different from the Hulme who had written ‘Autumn’ five years before, there is nevertheless a useful parallel between the two Hulmes. Since he began writing art criticism in 1913, by which time he had written all of his essays on modern poetry, Hulme’s pieces on modern art are not so much an ancillary part of his writings on poetry as a development of them. They show his theories about the poetic image maturing into new and significant areas. David Trotter frames it: ‘His Bergsonian incarnation required the role of poet and philosopher, his classicism that of political commentator, and his anti-humanism that of art critic’ (Trotter 2001, 225). Though a slight generalization  – Hulme’s anti-humanism went beyond art criticism, as ‘A Notebook’ demonstrates – the trajectory of Hulme’s career which Trotter

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sketches out here is broadly true. But his interest in abstractionism in art need not have involved a renunciation of his former doctrine of the poetic image. It is true that Hulme’s earlier stance on poetry was against abstraction, as he makes clear in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ when he writes that poetry ‘always endeavours to arrest you, and to make you continuously see a physical thing, to prevent you gliding through an abstract process’ (Hulme 2003, 80). Pound’s later injunction that the imagist should ‘go in fear of abstractions’ was a reiteration of this emphasis on the presentation of concrete things rather than abstract representation. But Hulme’s art criticism shows that what he most embraced about modern art was the artist’s willingness to find some image or symbol which would stand in for reality, and this is precisely what his poetry had sought to do. As Rebecca Beasley has remarked, Hulme’s art criticism is now established as an influential aspect of modernist writing in the genre. In 1914, he drew up a formula for the relationship between art and reality, where (R) represents reality and (A) abstraction, p(r) the artist’s interpretation of nature and a(r) an art using abstractions. This is not so far removed from his theorization of poetry six years before: Realistic art is not the only kind of art. If everything hangs on the (R) side of my diagram then the (a) in a (r) must seem a decayed form of (p) in p(r). But in this other abstract art the (a) in a (r) gets its whole meaning and significance from its dependence on the other end of the scale A, i.e., from its use by a creative artist as a method of expression. Looked at from this point of view, the position of abstraction is quite a different one. The abstractions used in this other art will not bring about a decadence, they are an essential part of its method. Their almost geometrical and non-vital character is not the result of weakness and lack of vitality in the art. They are not dead conventions, but the product of a creative process just as active as that in any realist art. (Hulme 2003, 129–30)

For Hulme, abstraction in art does not necessarily imply an art that does not hold up the mirror to nature; rather, the artist expresses his or her view of nature through some abstraction, rather than seeking merely to give some supposedly objective portrayal of reality. Some symbol acts as the intermediary between reality and the spectator. This comes close to the thesis behind his poems, where a surprising association between the moon and a farmer, for instance, is

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designed to make us think about the objects anew: the moon should be viewed as if for the first time, and it is the choice juxtaposition of the two objects which creates the ‘visual chord’ of which Hulme approved. A new symbol is summoned through the fusing or juxtaposing of the two surprising images. A critic who is also an artist must find some way to reconcile the criticism with the art, and although Hulme lost interest in writing poetry in his mid-twenties, he continued to write about it. Similarly, when he stopped writing about poetry, he did not stop writing about art – indeed, he turned from written art to visual art because his view of poetry was one which was primarily (though not exclusively) visual in outlook. His championing of Epstein and Wyndham Lewis, and his championing of the new abstract, geometric art over ‘vital’, realistic art – inspired by his reading of Worringer’s Abstraktion und Einfühlung – show, not a rejection of his earlier values, but an expansion of them to other mediums and other art forms. Later, he would expand these theories further to the political sphere, although by that stage only the broad distinction between humanism and the religious attitude would remain from his earlier thought. As he left off socializing with poets and began associating more and more with artists, he took the ideas he had already established regarding poetry and applied them, in an only slightly altered form, to sculpture and painting too. Ashley Dukes’s recollection that his and Hulme’s ‘general interest in “abstract” art led us especially to a revaluation of the images of poetry’ (Dukes 1942, 41) highlights this link, but what has received less attention is the specific nature of the parallels between Hulme’s idea of modern poetry and his writings about modern art. For both of Hulme’s central theories of modern poetry – namely, his defence of the classical attitude and his idea of the ‘visual chord’ created by the juxtaposition of two images – can be seen in his art criticism. The first of these theories re-emerges in the essay ‘Modern Art and its Philosophy’, where Hulme writes that ‘the re-emergence of geometrical art may be the precursor of the re-emergence of the corresponding attitude towards the world, and so, of the break up of the Renaissance humanistic attitude’ (Hulme 2003, 95). Indeed, he goes on: The fact that this change comes first in art, before it comes in thought, is easily understandable for this reason. So thoroughly are we soaked in the spirit of the period we live in, so strong is its influence over us, that we can only escape from it in an unexpected way, as it were, a side direction like art. (Hulme 2003, 95–6)

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The other overarching theory of art – that of presenting or reflecting the real world in an abstract way – is seen in the same essay, where Hulme writes of the new ‘association with the idea of machinery’ (Hulme 2003, 113) which he isolates as one of the salient features of the modern art he endorses. And ‘association’ is quite the word, for what machinery is associated with above all else is man, thus linking a perennial subject for painting and sculpture – the human form – with a new, surprising subject (technology and machinery). It is easy to see why Jacob Epstein’s Rock Drill appealed to Hulme: with its surprising association between man and machine, and its apparent dehumanizing quality, it acted as an echo for Hulme’s two central arguments for modern poetry: fresh metaphors and an anti-humanist quality. Of the picture Epstein drew for the Rock Drill, Hulme wrote that ‘I might, perhaps, say something about the representative element in it – a man is working a Rock Drill mounted on a tripod, the lines of which, in the drawing continue the lines of his legs’ (Hulme 2003, 117). Thus the man and the machine he works are curiously joined; but how different this is from the association between the moon and the red-faced farmer in ‘Autumn’ is difficult to say. Again, it is not that Epstein was directly influenced by Hulme’s poetry or essays. Instead, what is instructive is that Hulme should have chosen to champion Epstein’s work, having evidently recognized something of his own philosophical worldview in the artist’s outlook. Perhaps this is the most illustrative example of parafluence – interdisciplinary, transcending literature and philosophy into art, joining the critical review with the work of original creative art. Perhaps Hulme spoke better than even he realized when he wrote in his lecture on poetry: This new verse resembles sculpture rather than music; it appeals to the eye rather than to the ear. It has to mould images, a kind of spiritual clay, into definite shapes. (Hulme 2003, 66)

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Marking-Time: Hulme’s Influence

Hulmanism What would it mean to talk about Hulme’s influence when I have spent a large portion of the previous chapter discussing how parafluence is often a more accurate term for delineating his relationship with modernism? The thing to make clear is that when we use a phrase like ‘Hulme’s influence’, we are not referring merely to his influence on the modernists who were his immediate contemporaries and successors. Influence can have far-reaching implications and need not be limited to the modernist literary movement. Part of the argument of this final chapter is that Hulme’s defining influence is, in one sense, still to come: his work has things to tell us about literature and criticism now, 100 years after he was writing, just as it had things to tell those contemporaries like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound whose lives intersected with his. One of the neglected aspects of Hulme’s influence is his importance for the development of literary criticism during the years following the First World War. As Rebecca Beasley puts it, ‘Close reading was effectively invented in the mid-1920s by a young Cambridge lecturer called I. A. Richards, who had been deeply impressed by Eliot’s, Hulme’s and Pound’s work.’ For Beasley, Richards’ method ‘drew on Hulme’s and Pound’s criticism, in particular their aversion to rhetoric, their emphasis on visual imagery and precise statement, and, above all, their very close attention to language’ (Beasley 2007, 121–2). Ewa M. Thompson begins her survey of New Criticism with Hulme’s Speculations, stating that Hulme ‘ended, without knowing it, as one of the fathers of a critical trend. Among his essays, “Romanticism and Classicism” contains much of what later

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developed into the complexity of a critical movement’ (Thompson 1971, 39). Similarly, Frank Lentricchia has observed how ‘the critical thought of T. E. Hulme’ would later ‘feed the Anglo-American New Criticism’ (Lentricchia 1983, 114). Certainly, Hulme appears to have anticipated, and been at the forefront of the development of, two of the key schools of literary criticism of the last century, specifically Practical Criticism and New Criticism. Again, the word ‘influence’ is misleading: it is not as if New Critics consciously went to Speculations for inspiration. But Hulme was read by T. S. Eliot and I. A. Richards, who themselves would dominate literary criticism during the decades succeeding the First World War, and so the prioritization of the image would become a central tenet of mainstream critical thought until this was superseded by modern literary theory in the 1960s and 1970s. ‘It is probably due to Hulme that much modern criticism is Bergsonian’, Donald Davie wrote in 1955, ‘perhaps without knowing it. When, for instance, John Crowe Ransom writes that the poet’s is a world of “stubborn and contingent objects”, with a sign up, “This road does not go through to action; fictitious”, he is writing quite in the Bergsonian spirit’ (Davie 1976, 6–7). But if Hulme’s thought would be influential – at least in a parafluentially indirect way  – in the development of Practical Criticism and, later, New Criticism, then this may be true of even more recent developments in critical theory, too. A comparison of Hulme’s thought with Saussure’s reveals some surprising crossovers and similarities  – in attitude, in metaphor, in specific references. In an example of parafluence par excellence, both Hulme and Saussure reach for the same analogies when discussing language (Saussure’s ideas were not published until 1916, by which time Hulme had written all of his essays on language). Compare, for instance, these two passages: Language, in a manner of speaking, is a type of algebra consisting solely of complex terms. Some of its oppositions are more significant than others; but units and grammatical facts are only different names for designating diverse aspects of the same general fact: the functioning of linguistic oppositions. (Saussure 1959, 122) Compare in algebra, the real things are replaced by symbols. These symbols are manipulated according to certain laws which are independent of their meaning. N.B. At a certain point in the proof we cease to think of x as having

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a meaning and look upon it as a mere counter to be manipulated. (Hulme 2003, 37) But of all comparisons that might be imagined, the most fruitful is the one that might be drawn between the functioning of language and a game of chess. In both instances we are confronted with a system of values and their observable modifications. A game of chess is like an artificial realization of what language offers in a natural form. (Saussure 1959, 88) The chessboard of language expression, where the two players put down counters one after the other. (Hulme 2003, 44) This plurality consists in the nature of an ash-heap. In this ash-pit of cinders, certain ordered routes have been made, thus constituting whatever unity there may be – a kind of manufactured chess-board laid on a cinder-heap. Not a real chess-board impressed on the cinders, but the gossamer world of symbolic communication already spoken of. (Hulme 2003, 20)

Indeed, in the case of the chessboard, this image had also been seized upon by Ernest Fenollosa in his The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (1920), a book which greatly influenced Pound and which Pound himself was responsible for seeing into print. Fenollosa had written that medieval grammarians had believed that ‘thought deals with abstractions, concepts drawn out of things by a sifting process. These logicians never inquired how the “qualities” which they pulled out of things came to be there’ (Fenollosa et al. 2008, 47). He went on: ‘The truth of all their little checker-board juggling depended upon the natural order by which these powers or properties or qualities were folded in concrete things, yet they despised the “thing” as a mere “particular”, or pawn’ (Fenollosa et al. 2008, 47). What Fenollosa, Hulme and Pound did with these analogies was show that, in poetry, the emphasis needed to be returned to things – things in the world, rather than abstract objects or expressions.

Things ‘There are then two things to distinguish,’ Hulme writes in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’: first the particular faculty of mind to see things as they really are, and apart from the conventional ways in which you have been trained to see them.

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This is itself rare enough in all consciousness. Second, the concentrated state of mind, the grip over oneself which is necessary in the actual expression of what one sees. (Hulme 2003, 79)

Twice in swift succession one of Hulme’s favourite words, ‘things’, comes at us. ‘To see things as they really are’: but that word, ‘things’, has ceased to be what it once was. Just as a phrase like ‘seeing things’ denotes an experience – hallucination – relating neither to an act of genuine seeing nor to the perception of genuine things, so a phrase like ‘to see things as they really are’ must acknowledge that ‘things’ is being used to denote something abstract, something that has floated free of the concrete. Hulme would use the phrase again in ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’: ‘I have had to suppose that human perception gets crystallised out along certain lines, that it has certain fixed habits, certain fixed ways of seeing things, and is so unable to see things as they are’ (Hulme 1924, 145–6). But here we as readers run the risk of seeing things, of imagining that Hulme means more by the word ‘things’ than someone else would in using that phrase. For if there is one thing (there’s that word again) that can be glimpsed again and again in Hulme’s prose writing, it is the phrase ‘physical thing’: Words seen as physical thing like a piece of string, e.g. walking on dark boulevard. Girl hidden in trees passes on other side. How to get this. (Hulme 2003, 46) There are in prose certain type situations and arrangements of words, which move as automatically into certain other arrangements as do functions in algebra. One only changes the X’s and Y’s back into physical things at the end of the process. (79–80) It is not a counter language, but a visual concrete one. It is a compromise for a language of intuition which would hand over sensations bodily. It always endeavours to arrest you, and to make you continuously see a physical thing, to prevent you gliding through an abstract process. (80) If I say: putting in the ‘finer touches’, it expresses what I mean by the refinement of language. But the damnable thing is that if I use that phrase to another person, it produces no equal effect on him. It is one of the rounded counters of language and so has the least possible meaning. What to me is an entirely physical

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thing, a real clay before me, moulded, an image, is when used nothing but an expression like ‘in so far, etc.’. (41) It chooses fresh epithets and fresh metaphors, not so much because they are new and we are tired of the old, but because the old cease to convey a physical thing and become abstract counters. (80)

Hulme’s ‘Notes on Language and Style’ concludes with the words, ‘All theories as toys’ (Hulme 2003, 58). Perhaps we might draw a connection between Hulme’s theories and what Bill Brown has called ‘Thing Theory’: As they circulate through our lives, we look through objects (to see what they disclose about history, society, nature, or culture – above all, what they disclose about us), but we only catch a glimpse of things. We look through objects because there are codes by which our interpretive attention makes them meaningful, because there is a discourse of objectivity that allows us to use them as facts. (Brown 2001, 4)

Hulme’s reference to ‘the particular faculty of mind to see things as they really are’ suggests a rewriting of Matthew Arnold’s famous dictum: namely that the aim of criticism is ‘to see the object as in itself it really is’ (Arnold 1861, 64). Indeed, Arnold himself had written in Culture and Anarchy of ‘the very desire to see things as they are’ (Arnold 1932, 44). Brown argues that we have lost the ability to see things: even that phrase, ‘seeing things’, usually denotes the apparent perception of things which are not actually there. If you are ‘seeing things’, the chances are that the things you see are not real. Hulme wished to return poetry to this observation of tangible and ‘physical things’, and perhaps it is within this notion of the physicality of things, with ‘Thing Theory’, that we can glimpse Hulme’s opinions on the function of poetry. In ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’, he wrote: ‘We still perceive the mystery of things, but we perceive it in entirely a different way – no longer directly in the form of action, but as an impression, for example in Whistler’s pictures’ (Hulme 2003, 63–4). The mystery of things: thus the physical thing is united with a vague sense of something mystical and mysterious. But the physical aspect is of primary importance: the very word ‘things’ has become one of Hulme’s ‘counters’ because it is used in a vague, abstract sense, no longer necessarily conveying a tangible reality. So, too, is Brown’s Thing Theory concerned with a return to ‘physical things’: for Brown, there are ‘occasions of

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contingency – the chance interruption – that disclose a physicality of things’ (Brown 2001, 4). Indeed, If Thing Theory sounds like an oxymoron, then, it may not be because things reside in some balmy elsewhere beyond theory but because they lie both at hand and somewhere outside the theoretical field, beyond a certain limit, as a recognizable yet illegible remainder or as the entifiable that is unspecifiable. Things lie beyond the grid of intelligibility the way mere things lie outside the grid of museal exhibition, outside the order of objects. (Brown 2001, 5)

This return to the physicality of things in the world shares much with Hulme’s theory of modern poetry. There is no engagement with Hulme’s ideas without a simultaneous engagement with Thing Theory, whether consciously made or not. For the vogue for cultural materialism in much recent literary-critical work  – whether it takes the form of New Historicism, archival research or bibliographical history – reminds us that literature manifests itself, first and foremost, as a thing or sequence of things out there in the world. Brown’s work on Thing Theory does not discuss imagism or Hulme, so the present chapter might be considered an addendum to Thing Theory, another ‘thing’ to be mentioned in connection with this hopeful return to seeing objects as physical entities. The thingness of objects can certainly be seen in imagist poetry, and in Hulme’s own verse: On a summer day, in Town, Where chimneys fret the cumuli, Flora passing in disdain Lifts her flounced blue gown, the sky. So I see her white cloud petticoat, Clear Valenciennes, meshed by twisted cowls, Rent by tall chimneys, torn lace, frayed and fissured. (Hulme 2003, 6)

This is undeniably phallic, rooted in solid, hard objects – the chimneys, the gown – which interact in a physical, concrete way. In many ways this is a love poem for the new imagist generation; but rather than talking of the interaction between a man and a woman in abstract terms, Hulme uses clear and precise images for them to suggest a symbolic, sexual union. But, because of the interloping of the industrial onto the scene  – the chimneys, whose smoke

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does nevertheless merge with the natural through the clouds  – the poem is devoid of romanticism or sentimentality. Everything here is man-made and grounded in the urban world of modern physical things, rather than the abstract world of roses, mountains or trees: Flora may be named for the floweriness of the rural scene, but her name is itself a construction, the construction of her parents, just as the dress she wears has probably been manufactured in a factory that boasts chimneys like the one in the poem. Like Whistler’s paintings, Hulme’s poem presents us with a clear and individual impression of a scene, vividly felt and seen by the artist, its theme simple, grounded in the world of real things. The entire philosophy of the image was an attempt to bring physical things back into the language of poetry. Literary theory, Brown and other Thing Theorists argue, has forgotten that objects actually are physical things, so we need to be reminded of this fact. Poetry ‘chooses fresh epithets and fresh metaphors, not so much because they are new and we are tired of the old, but because the old cease to convey a physical thing and become abstract counters’ (Hulme 2003, 80). At the same time, however, what both Hulme and Thing Theorists acknowledge is that there is no real way of engaging with ‘things’ that does not distort or alter them in the process. For someone whose thinking can strike us as anti-materialist, Hulme is in many ways a writer who is concerned with, above all, the materiality of things.

Critical-creative This materiality of things which Hulme’s writing acknowledges has other ties with more recent critical developments. For the imagist ethos which Hulme’s work helped to inspire – albeit parafluentially – can also arguably be glimpsed in critical-creative writing, which seeks to reflect the critic’s own personal response to specific moments, whether in the literary text or in other aspects of experience. Such writing is often concerned with facts and the materiality of history: archival research, library records and other sources of information which help to inform the critic’s subjective response to the world. This is worth exploring in more depth, but first it is necessary to state why the critical and the creative are connected in Hulme, and how this might be theorized.

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The place to begin with an assessment of the critical-creative in Hulme, as ever, is with the poems. It is worth quoting Hulme’s ‘Madman’ in full. It has received very little critical attention, yet is important for helping us to understand his art: As I walk by the river Those who have not yet withdrawn pass me I see past them, touch them. And in the distance, over the water, Far from the lights, I see Night, that dark savage, But I will not fear him. Four walls are round me. I can touch them. If I die, I can float by. Moan and hum and remember the sea In heaven, Oh my spirit, Remember the sea and its moaning. Hum in the presence of God, it will sustain you. Again I am cold, as after weeping. And I tremble – but there is no wind. (Hulme 2003, 7)

The poem offers a personal experience, but it enacts several of Hulme’s key theoretical ideas: clear images, fresh metaphors (the rather distasteful image of ‘Night, that dark savage’) and employment of free verse over regular rhyme and metre. But there is more to the poem’s style: J. B. Harmer proposes that this poem points to a possible ‘unbalance’ within Hulme. Citing a ‘schizophrenic poem’ which R. D. Laing quotes in his book The Divided Self, Harmer wonders whether ‘Hulme carried within him an unbalance or at least an awareness of unbalance such as exists, if only as a possibility, in the personalities of many artists. In him it was denied or repressed’ (Harmer 1975, 54). Does Hulme’s poetry reveal a dissociation of the mind from reality such as is found in some people who suffer from schizophrenia? The poem certainly offers an intensely personal and specific experience that is reliant on touch as well as sight, and the apostrophe to the poet’s ‘spirit’ – like the entreaty to God in ‘The Embankment’ – comes at us suddenly, suggesting a fraught mind. I do not believe for a moment that Hulme was schizophrenic in the clinical sense of the word. But Harmer’s suggestion does invite us to pause and consider

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a metaphorical application. For there is the other meaning of schizophrenia, attested by the OED; that is, schizophrenia in the sense inaugurated by T. S. Eliot in 1933: ‘I believe that for a poet to be also a philosopher he would have to be virtually two men; I cannot think of any example of this thorough schizophrenia, nor can I see anything to be gained by it: the work is better performed inside two skulls than one’ (Eliot 1964, 90). But since Hulme was, as Scott Cohen’s hyphenation has it, a ‘poet-philosopher’ (Cohen 2006, 83), he is proof that some writers were (indeed, are) capable of ‘this thorough schizophrenia’ which Eliot mentions, albeit to a limited, and sometimes derivative, degree in the case of both. Of course, ‘schizophrenia’ in the sense of ‘split personality’ which Eliot inaugurated in the above quotation does not amount to the same sort of schizophrenia which Harmer implies in his analysis of Hulme’s poetry; but the implication does invite us to think about the different ways in which Hulme approaches modern poetry. For the freedom and loosening of rigid metrical control represented by Hulme’s poetry is also glimpsed in several of his key philosophical essays, ‘Cinders’ and ‘Notes on Language and Style’ chief among them. He unsettles the boundaries between poetry and philosophy, and in doing so he unsettles himself: he loses himself in a number of personalities. His style is unpredictable and his argument is not unified, but fragmented. It is almost as if his discussions of reality are akin to the clinical definition of schizophrenia which was being developed at this time (the word is first used in 1911, but its earlier description as dementia praecox dates from 1899). The fragmentation of syntax and the gradual erosion of conventional form in these ‘essays’ form a neat parallel or complement to the free verse forms of many of Hulme’s poems, a kind of metaphorical divorce from rigidity and reality which is associated with clinical schizophrenia. Of course, it is worth reiterating that this does not amount to a suggestion that Hulme was schizophrenic. But, as in the work of Deleuze and Guattari and their famous phenomenon of schizoanalysis, Hulme’s writing can be related metaphorically to both clinical schizophrenia and Eliot’s idea of the ‘thorough schizophrenia’ of the poet-philosopher. Indeed, the frequency of hallucinations among people suffering from certain kinds of schizophrenia offers a psychiatric parallel to Hulme’s emphasis on visual images: ‘Each word must be an image seen, not a counter’ (Hulme 2003, 38). Literature is hallucination.

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Of course, reading Hulme’s writing biographically can be a dangerous pursuit. But what about autobiographically? And what is the link between literary criticism and autobiography? The link between criticism and biography is long-established, and Hulme presents critics and biographers alike with the difficulty of judging how far his life and his words coincide or agree. Some of his writings, such as his later essays and notes on the war, are reconciled easily enough with his known support of the war; but what about his earlier work? ‘Cinders’ was originally conceived, Edward P. Comentale reminds us, ‘as a modern parable’ in which Aphra, Hulme’s fictional creation, ‘served as a poet-hero whose power lay solely in his ability to touch’ (Comentale 2006, 215). It becomes more difficult here to tell how much is personal and how much is persona. This idea of persona  – of getting away from one’s own personality  – is something that literary criticism has only recently begun to explore. In many ways, the objective mode  – which has dominated literary criticism since it was institutionalized in universities in the late nineteenth century  – is now beginning to find itself questioned and challenged by experimental criticism, and by critical-creative writing. This is similar to the ways in which modernist literature questioned the objective realist mode of much nineteenth-century fiction. Critics such as Geoffrey Hartman, Hélène Cixous, John Schad and Nicholas Royle  – themselves influenced by and engaging with the writing of the founder of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida  – have written works of criticism which explore the nature of the critic’s own personality, and the critic’s relationship to the text being analysed. But in many ways Hulme was one of the first to explore this idea, and it is worth noting the ways in which his writing anticipates recent developments in critical-creative writing. Hulme’s writing can be productively viewed as a touchstone for critical-creative writing: the sense of complementarity between his poetry and theoretical writing, the experimental and fragmentary nature of his prose essays, and his call for a fresh sense of poetic language can all be used to point to new directions for literary criticism. In other words, Hulme’s modernist and proto-modernist writing has important things to tell us about a possible modernist, or postmodernist, future for literary criticism. To quote from Hulme in his ‘German Chronicle’, ‘This is not a mere dead fact from history, but throws light on the present’ (Hulme 2003, 88).

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Hulme’s poems enact all of the major theories from the early stages of his career as a writer: the imperfectability of man, who is always finding himself tied to the ground, limited and restricted in what he can achieve; the recording of two distinct images in adjacent lines of verse, and the ways in which this can create a fresh and vital style of poetry; the importance of the relationship between language and thought. But Hulme’s prose may also tell us something new, and it is to his prose writings – as examples of a new literary style – that I turn now. In the second chapter I looked at how Hulme draws on the fragment – from Shakespeare, from Browning and in his own poetry – to create a new piece of writing. The poet thus offers a critical reading of a poem in the form of a new poem: a fragment begets a new fragment, with the new poem offering a form of ‘creative commentary’ on the older text. Yet the expression of such ideas in fragments would perhaps be a new phenomenon, not yet fully realized, but suggested in Hulme’s own works, especially ‘Cinders’. ‘Expression obviously partakes of the nature of cinders’, as Hulme writes in his other fragmentary essay, ‘Notes on Language and Style’ (Hulme 2003, 48). What is striking about this is the complementary relationship between subject and style: the world is made up of endless plurality, and in writing about it we often end up reducing this plurality to a unified system (whether philosophical, theoretical or scientific) which thus falls short of capturing the real ‘cindery’ nature of the world. This Bergsonian idea infects even the style of Hulme’s writing: to write about cinders, one must write cinders. However, alongside Bergson there is another influence: Nietzsche. Elizabeth Kuhn as argued: ‘The idea of the cinder, taken from Hulme’s earliest writings, approximates Nietzsche’s aphoristic style’ (Kuhn 2011, 9). This takes me back, nearly 30 years, to another prophet of a new form of criticism, another innovator whose study of modernist art had shown him the way forward for art-criticism. He was Gregory L. Ulmer, and he wrote in 1983, Criticism now is being transformed in the same way that literature and the arts were transformed by the avant-garde movements in the early decades of this century. The break with ‘mimesis,’ with the values and assumptions of ‘realism’, which revolutionized the modernist arts, is now underway (belatedly) in criticism, the chief consequence of which, of course, is a

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change in the relation of the critical text to its object – literature. (Ulmer 1985, 83)

Literary criticism is normally concerned with unification rather than fragmentation: with forging a coherent argument, with linking disparate strands together, and with bridging gaps or distances between disciplines. But, at least when it comes to modernist writing – concerned as it is with fragmentation and decay, and suspicious as it is of grand theories or unified narratives – perhaps this critical model can only take us so far. Traditional literary criticism fails to respond adequately to the stylistic peculiarities and distinctiveness of modernism, and Hulme brings this failure startlingly into focus. His thoughts on the ‘cindery’ nature of reality are written in the style of fragmentary notes because he wishes to challenge the widely held notion that one can faithfully portray reality through language; the unity of coherent argument is a myth, as Bergson had suggested. Similarly, perhaps modern literary criticism needs to acknowledge that attempts to respond to certain types of avant-garde text can only achieve so much when a traditional, unified argument is employed: a fragmentary critical response gets closer to the truth of what some experimental modernists are actually seeking to convey. Perhaps we have not yet explored this modernist influence on critical writing; perhaps it is only now emerging as a fully fledged movement in academic literary study. The much-touted and long-lamented slow, lingering death of theory, the high moment (now passed) of New Historicism and the resurgence of interest in close reading of literary texts: all of these factors have brought us to a pass that was perhaps always inevitable, ever since modernism a century ago. Hulme and his contemporaries, chiefly Eliot and Pound, have all influenced the course of literary criticism over the last century. Rebecca Beasley has shown how close reading in literary criticism was ‘effectively invented’ by I. A. Richards, who was ‘deeply impressed by Eliot’s, Hulme’s and Pound’s work’. She goes on to suggest that Practical Criticism, Richards’ brainchild, had drawn on ‘Hulme’s and Pound’s criticism, in particular their aversion to rhetoric, their emphasis on visual imagery and precise statement, and, above all, their very close attention to language.’ They ‘taught us to read, and continue to do so’

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(Beasley 2007, 121–2). But if they are to continue to teach us how to read, how to respond to works of literature in a way which makes us alive to the linguistic devices and idiosyncrasies through which writers achieve their effects, then we must look to their own style of criticism, and it is here that Hulme emerges as the most valuable of the three. With his emphasis on style, his own idiosyncratic use of different forms and genres to impart his theories of literature, and in the overall synthesis between his innovative poetry and his fragmentary prose, Hulme has noteworthy things to tell us about the emerging field of critical-creative writing. Now, as close reading comes back to the fore again, it is in the new subgenre of critical-creative writing that it can be used in an important and valuable way. In 1920, Alfred Richard Orage wrote of him: ‘He was still very young, but the fragments he had begun to accumulate were plainly intended for a cyclopean architecture’ (Orage 1974, 149). Yet the fragmentary nature of much of Hulme’s work was part of the plan, as evidenced by his organizing of many of his key critical ideas into the fragmentary piece titled ‘Cinders’, or the ‘Notes on Language and Style’ and ‘A Notebook’, or the short poetic fragments he left. Since he abandoned the writing of poetry several years before his death, these pieces were evidently meant to remain fragmentary. Even the complete poems partake of the fragmentary, as though part of a larger drama which we glimpse only through these few lines. ‘Like Eliot,’ Joseph Maddrey writes, ‘Hulme believed that the modern age was characterized largely by fragmentation’ (Maddrey 2009, 66). But perhaps Hulme’s fragments, shored against his ruins, might offer a productive way of viewing the nature of literary criticism and theory, and in particular the ways in which there can be no clear distinction or demarcation between critical and creative writing. For in presenting his critical and philosophical manifestos in the form of fragments or ‘cinders’, Hulme acknowledged the same need for a scaling down of expression as he had identified in poetry. Modern criticism as act of fragmentation: breaking off, unsure of itself, aware there can be no objective and whole readings, no unity but only a show of unity. Breaking off and breaking up, modern criticism is a heap of broken images that Hulme and Eliot show to us. But what might these images be? Here I wish to link Hulme’s prose with his poetry, which is, as I have already discussed, all about finding the right association, about making us see the world anew by hitting upon, and dreaming

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up, new and original metaphors and relationships between different objects and qualities. Of ‘Cinders’ and ‘Notes on Language and Style’, Patrick McGuinness has observed: ‘They are not simply intellectual ruminations, but dark and intense fantasies (with a protagonist, Aphra) on language and knowledge’ (McGuinness 2003, xxii). First, then, some borrowings from Hulme’s poetic language, by way of shedding some light on the critical-creative and some possible ways forward for literary criticism. Possibly the most famous ‘poetic’ prose passage from Hulme’s writing is this, the closing lines from ‘Cinders’: A melancholy spirit, the mind like a great desert lifeless, and the sound of march music in the street, passes like a wave over that desert, unifies it, but then goes. (Hulme 2003, 36)

The lyrical quality to this, and the recourse to similes (the mind like a desert, but also passing like a wave over that same desert), lend it some common ground with Hulme’s poetry, as does ‘the sound of march music’ (compare the march of ‘In the City Square’). This lyrical use of imagery concludes the essay, not with an objective summary, but with a personal vision or image which metaphorically reflects the argument of the essay (if we may call ‘Cinders’ an essay of sorts): the wasteland of meaning is unified by the poet or philosopher for a moment, but then the chaos returns, and we are left in need of new ways of comprehending the disorder of lived experience. This crude paraphrase of Hulme’s final sentence is lacking the power of the visual images which he employs, and this is the point: criticism, which is used to dealing in only the images of the literary text being critiqued, can carry greater force if it uses its own images to convey its meaning. Like modern poetry, which needs to deal in original images that arrest the reader and make us see something in a new light, modern criticism might also deal in original images which impart the mood and argument of the critic more powerfully than through the use of prose ‘counters’. The march or procession is an image that comes back to both Hulme’s poetry and prose a number of times. Hulme described how, while at the Bologna conference in 1911, he was struck by the procession outside in the street, which included soldiers and marching bands and cheering crowds. The progress of man outside in the street appealed to his classical sympathies, since these people progressed, but in a way that did ‘not violate the classical ideal of the fixed and constant nature of man’ (quoted in Ferguson 2002, 91).

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They marched but did not really go anywhere. ‘To cross Europe with the sole purpose of attending a congress, and then to watch the procession instead, would be too much of a comic spectacle’, he wrote. ‘To my lasting regret I went in. I missed a spectacle I shall never see again. I heard words I shall often hear again – I left the real world and entered that of Reality’ (91). As Hulme would remark, modern poetry ‘no longer deals with heroic action, it has become definitely and finally introspective and deals with expression and communication of momentary phrases in the poet’s mind. It was well put by Mr G. K. Chesterton in this way – that where the old dealt with the Siege of Troy, the new attempts to express the emotions of a boy fishing’ (Hulme 2003, 63). Of course, Eliot would later go on to combine these two notions of poetry in The Waste Land, where a man fishing epically summons the myth of the Fisher King, whose actions have repercussions for the whole society. But Hulme showed how poetry must first be stripped of its preoccupation with epic themes and grand tapestries. ‘The Embankment’ is his condensed and concise thesis for what modern poetry should do: return us to the necessary and to make us see the ways in which new images (so far as poetry is concerned) can be aligned with older, stock images. Witness, in this instance, the double-association at work in ‘The Embankment’, between the sky and a blanket, and between stars and moth-holes. No further elaboration on this clear, effective metaphor need be made – it was treated in detail in Chapter 2 – but what remains to be thought, perhaps, is the implication this has for modern writing in general. For if critical-creative writing can learn anything from modernism, it is not only the value of experimentation – which leads to the ability to see the text as if for the first time  – but also the importance of the relationship between the traditional and the modern. This is first and foremost a matter of metaphor: we draw a line between the old and the new by comparing the two, and by seeking to destroy the artificial sense of a boundary set up between them. Take, for example, the critical and the creative. Literary criticism has for a long time known what critical analysis, critical discourse, and so-called ‘formal writing’ entail. But the creative has only recently begun to be assimilated into the realm of critical writing. Of course, it has always been there: literary criticism exists to judge, analyse and explain work which might usually be described as ‘creative’, whether it is fiction, poetry or drama. But only recently has criticism begun to make a sustained attempt to question this false boundary between the critical

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and the creative, and Hulme’s writing offers us an opportunity to explore the nature of this boundary. Take the question of form. Hulme’s writing erodes the clear, rigid boundary between poetry and prose. He may dislike prose, describing it as a ‘museum’ where dead metaphors are kept, but his work – when considered as a whole – invites us to question what we might mean by ‘poetry’ and ‘prose’. His writing on poetry reveals itself, at bottom, as part of a wider attempt to theorize the relationship between language and reality – not just poetic language, but the language of prose as well. He begins ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’ with a statement about the limits of modern verse: ‘The President told us last week that poetry was akin to religion. It is nothing of the sort. It is a means of expression just as prose is and if you can’t justify it from that point of view it’s not worth preserving’ (Hulme 2003, 59). The main thrust of this lecture is, of course, that modern poetry needs to shed the shell of regular metre and rhyme, and become freer in its form. Similarly, his prose pieces  – particularly ‘Cinders’ and ‘Notes on Language in Style’ – seek to reject the formalities of traditional critical and philosophical prose, and to embrace a fragmentary, experimental, avant-garde style. The closing words of ‘Cinders’ highlight this innovative approach. Like the traditional conclusion to an essayistic piece, the closing words essentially sum up the main thrust of the writer’s argument: here, that the world is constantly in a state of flux, and any illusion of unity is merely temporary. It recapitulates what Hulme had said earlier in the essay: ‘Formerly, one liked theories because they reduced the world to a single principle. Now the same reason disgusts us. The flats of Canada are incomprehensible on any single theory. The world only comprehensible on the cinder theory’ (Hulme 2003, 22). Comprehensible, but hardly comprehensive: for such unity is no longer possible, nor even dreamed of. But at the same time Hulme’s words also suggest that his is the lone voice crying in the wilderness: like a man stranded in the desert, he is on his own, the trailblazer pointing the way towards a ‘new attitude of mind’. Hulme was writing at an important time concerning theories about the relationship between language and reality. There was Bergson’s philosophy, but this was also the time that Freud was establishing psychoanalysis, and in these years Saussure was developing his theory of semiotics where the sign broke down into the ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’. Such an example of convergent evolution

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of thought, a sort of oblique parafluence, highlights the extent to which writers and thinkers of the day sought to undermine any stable relationship between word and world, as the fiction of Joseph Conrad also makes clear. Hulme’s work displays a deep-rooted interest in the power of opposites, and specifically in viewing the world as structured by a series of binary opposites: romanticism and classicism, humanism and religion, language and reality. Many of his ideas in this respect prefigure the structuralism of later thinkers such as Barthes and Lacan. Hulme is essentially a formalist, seeking to understand and interpret the world through symbols, and imposing upon the chaotic cindery reality of the world a more structured system of meaning. Hulme sees the world as chaos and believes that to make sense of the world, to give it meaning, we must invent systems and symbols which will give structure to reality. However, in acknowledging the disordered reality of the world, Hulme also paves the way for poststructuralist ideas; he is also a proto-poststructuralist (if such a preposterous – literally ‘before after’ – term may be employed) in seeking to erode a number of rigid boundaries. For instance, between poetry and prose. Alan Robinson has argued that, in his rejection of regular metre and rhythm in verse, Hulme calls for a poetry that is in many ways indistinguishable from prose. ‘There is in Hulme’s theory nothing to distinguish poetry from prose’, he writes; ‘his only criterion of excellence is sincerity’ (Robinson 1985, 75). To this we might add that poetry needs to employ fresh metaphors that will arrest the reader, but this is more a matter of content than form. Edward Comentale and Andrzej Gasiorek have written that Hulme’s writing ‘reveals affinities with some of the most thought-provoking and disruptive modernisms of the twentieth century, such as the post-Marxism of Adorno and Arendt, the phenomenology of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, the deconstruction of de Man and Derrida.’ They see Hulme as ‘already centrally involved in the inevitable and ceaseless overturning of modernisms that has passed into postmodernity and postmodern criticism’ (Comentale and Gasiorek 2006, 4). Hulme’s anti-humanist stance itself carries aspects of humanism; just as he cannot fully escape the romantic impulse in poetry, if poetry is to have any meaning in the generally understood sense, so his philosophy cannot shut out humanist principles altogether. This is one place where we might glimpse a Hulmean influence on the ‘postmodern criticism’ Comentale and Gasiorek identify.

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Humanism is the new attitude In 1924, T. S. Eliot described Hulme as having been ‘the forerunner of a new attitude of mind’ (Eliot 1924, 231), and this new attitude was for Eliot, as for Hulme, a religious and anti-humanist one. Eliot’s conversion to Anglo-Catholicism three years after he wrote these words about Hulme, and his later, quasi-devotional poetry, show just how deeply ingrained in both Hulme and Eliot this religious attitude really was. It was important for their strand of modernism, but what I am concerned with in these final pages is the afterlife of modernism. My contention is that, for all of his talk of rejection of humanism in favour of ‘the religious attitude’, Hulme never fully managed to escape the humanist attitude, as evinced by his struggle with the romantic implications of Bergson’s philosophy.1 This may be the most significant of all the paradoxes found in his work. His nebulous use of the term ‘original sin’ and the well-documented discussions over the nature and extent of Hulme’s religious beliefs, which Ferguson explores in detail in his biography, all serve to conceal what might be called the humanist aspects of Hulme’s writing: the emphasis on personal experience or mini-epiphany, the importance of emotion in poetry and the Bergsonian nature of the artist as someone with special access to some higher ‘intuitive’ plane. Then there is the question of style. As David Trotter puts it, ‘The man who found in Rousseau’s thought the epitome of the world-view he spent much of his career contesting wrote like Rousseau, in a mode which [. . .] may under some circumstances lend itself to paranoia’ (Trotter 2001, 226). ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’ offers one of the most telling statements of this concealed humanism. ‘I have not a catholic taste but a violently personal and prejudiced one,’ he writes. ‘I have no reverence for tradition’ (Hulme 2003, 59). But in rejecting the ‘tradition’ of literature and philosophy since the Renaissance, he also undermines his own concept of the fixed and non-progressive nature of humanity. We might even say that, although he uses the word ‘catholic’ here in its lower-case and more general (one might say catholic) sense, as opposed to its narrowly religious sense, the sentence nevertheless provides a suggestive insight into Hulme’s inconsistent theory. For what is Hulme’s rejection of progress in humanity, his concept of original sin in art and philosophy, if not a belief in, and reverence for, tradition?

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Tradition, of course, was the subject of one of T. S. Eliot’s most famous essays, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919). But Eliot did not reject tradition. Rather he saw tradition as something that was constantly being reinvented and expanded as new poets joined the ranks of the canonical greats: It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. (Eliot 1999b, 14)

Hulme’s attempt to sever modern poetry from poetry of the past is disingenuous. This is the writer who argues rhetorically: ‘Personally I am of course in favour of the complete destruction of all verse more than 20 years old. But that happy event will not, I am afraid, take place until Plato’s desire has been realized and a minor poet has become dictator’ (Hulme 2003, 60). All of this is Hulme’s bombast and rhetoric letting himself get carried away with his own argument. The moral philosopher Anthony Quinton wrote about what Hulme means when he uses religious terms: Furthermore, the absolute values on which Hulme insists are, to the extent that they are ethical, very far from being Christian. His ideal of human excellence is close to that of Sorel who was an uncompromising affirmer of the claims of heroic virtue, an exponent of the morality of honour, a less fetid and sickly Nietzsche. Hulme was conspicuously devoid of the prime Christian virtue of humility and his evident lack of qualms about the fact suggests that he did not think much of it. For one who saw all the debilitating spiritual weaknesses of the age as stemming from the thinkers of the Renaissance, he was curiously committed to the Renaissance ideal of heroic virtù. (Quinton 2011, 106)

Hulme’s anti-romantic – and, in later writing, anti-humanist – philosophy of art is always being undermined by the intrusion of romantic and humanist thought,

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the ideas of personality and individual human emotion which had been fostered by the Renaissance. If Hulme’s religious attitude had a purpose, it was that it helped to clarify the aims of the imagists; but here, as was shown in Chapter 2, the great shift was caused not by the Renaissance in art but by the Reformation in religion, which Hulme and other commentators saw as a metaphorical attitude that was to be rejected in imagist poetry. The return was not to original sin but to the Real Presence – the irony being, of course, that the term ‘Real Presence’ was used in a metaphorical (and therefore, not real) sense. The growing academic interest in life writing in the last few years, in placing a writer’s personality and personal experience at the centre of the work, has also helped to foster a new development in academic writing itself: what has been called, in the absence of another title, critical-creative writing. Such writing emphasizes not only the poet or novelist’s own personality, but that of the critic as well: the life and biography of the person reading the text is seen as integral to the way in which that reader or critic responds to the text. Of course, poststructuralism has been instrumental in paving the way for this new development in autobiographical criticism  – Barthes’s much-discussed ‘death of the author’ being the touchstone of the ongoing battle between intentionalism and reader-oriented criticism, between author-centred and reader-centred interpretations of literary texts. But in many ways the seeds of this divide go back before Hulme. Oscar Wilde, in his 1890 essay-dialogue ‘The Critic as Artist’ (an essay whose hybrid form, like Hulme’s experimental ‘essays’, helps to enact its innovative mission-statement), had asserted that criticism is ‘the only civilized form of autobiography’ (Wilde 1996, 121). Hulme himself, in ‘Modern Art and Its Philosophy’, would later write: ‘You will have to excuse my putting it in autobiographical shape, for, after all, the break-up of a general attitude if it ever occurs will be a collection of autobiographies’ (Hulme 2003, 96). The break-up of criticism, or at least the broadening out of literary-critical discourse in the wake of the break-up of ‘literary theory’, will undoubtedly be – at least in part – a collection of autobiographies. But I would go further than Hulme, with his anti-humanist carapace firmly attached, would ever go, and propose that the new development in literary criticism – which fuses the genre with life writing in innovative ways – will very much be humanist in its philosophy, no longer devotional to the literary text, no longer implicitly setting up a false hierarchy between the god-like author and the inferior reader. The

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idea of objectivity in criticism will be openly questioned and challenged, and the subjective – the personal, the individual and the psychologized – nature of all reading will be acknowledged in criticism, reminding us that literature is consumed by people who are very different, with very distinct backgrounds and ways of seeing the world and of responding to the text. One example of such practice can be glimpsed in a recent book by literary critic Jonathan Roberts. His study of Blake, Wordsworth and religion includes a brief autobiographical interlude which demonstrates the critic’s own personal relationship to the writing of these two Romantic poets. As Roberts writes: From its academic inception, literary studies has been anxious to appear rigorous, a ‘proper’ subject. It has shied away from accusations of subjectivity, and has been consequently inhospitable to personal testimonies. I offer my personal experience in this chapter in the hope that it might cast a different light on the question of Romantic religion, and may contribute to the illumination of that subject. Why might it achieve that? Because the matter of religion in Blake’s and Wordsworth’s writing is not translatable to a set of nested statements or alphabetical pigeon-holes; it is not a poste restante awaiting the right archivist simply to unlock its treasures. The issue is more complex than that because while the more traditional modes of academic inquiry adopted elsewhere in this book can achieve a range of intellectual objectives, they are ontologically at odds with their subject matter when it comes to religious experience. When it comes to subjectivity, memory, and altered states of consciousness, approaching this subject through a personal contemplation may be more consistent with, and amenable to, the poems under discussion. (Roberts 2010, 41)

Another notable example of this call for subjective life writing within literary criticism, the better to illuminate the subject or text under discussion, is from one of the most significant innovators in the field, John Schad, whose pioneering 2007 book Someone Called Derrida fuses autobiographical reminiscences about the author’s father with the works of Jacques Derrida, with a particular focus on the work ‘Envois’ from The Post Card (Schad 2007). This novelistic work of archival research, literary criticism, (auto)biography, and detective story fuses genres, and in doing so refuses attempts on our part to classify it under any single form, genre or discipline. It is literary-critical life writing, to offer the most concise definition possible.

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Why should criticism want to have this modernist influence? What is wrong with the traditional modes of critical discourse that have been the hallmarks of literary criticism since its inception in universities over a 100 years ago? Well, for one thing, of course, it has always been evolving. Literary criticism has always maintained a particular form and style which relies, in the main, on an observation of the traditional rules of syntax, an eschewal of first-person pronouns in favour of the more detached third person, and a reluctance to call upon personal epiphany and autobiographical context. But the criticism practised by, say, the post-structuralists of the 1980s is stylistically different from the work of Empson or Richards from the 1920s and 1930s, whatever their superficial similarities. And as Barthes and others have shown, all reading experiences are different, even for the same reader (my experience of reading Hulme’s poems for a tenth time is markedly different from my reaction to them the first time I read them). Criticism has evolved, but the final frontier of its evolution might be that strange thing called ‘life writing’, or, if you will, autobiography. Fashions have changed in literary criticism, but they are generally slower to change than they are in literature. In some ways criticism is always behind literature, not only in the sense of following – and critiquing – literature, but in the sense of being slow to adopt new developments and innovations in literature. This may all seem a long way from anti-humanist Hulme, but in many ways he was at the forefront of ‘a new attitude of mind’ that straddled not just literature, but philosophy, culture, and society more generally, as Eliot recognized. His use of both philosophical and theoretical writing and poetry to disseminate his ideas suggests not just a poet-critic, like Eliot or William Empson, but a poetic critic – one whose writing often pushes at the boundaries of conventional prose. And if there is one thing we can learn from Hulme in this regard, it is the importance of wilful misreading, or misappropriation. If Hulme’s misreading of Bergson helped to establish a clear focus for the rationale behind much modernist poetry and art, then perhaps my misreading (or, what I would rather call, my counter-reading) of Hulme will help to bring more startlingly into clarity the modernist and postmodernist attitude that is now ‘underway (belatedly) in criticism’, to borrow from Gregory Ulmer (Ulmer 1985, 83). Hulme’s experiments in literary form belie his classical and anti-humanist attitudes in philosophy: he is a writer whose response to the

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world is always deeply personal, with a profound confidence in humanity’s ability to innovate and create (he certainly had confidence in his own ability, despite his later dismissal of his poetic achievement). But his classicism offers a warning to critics who would seek to temper traditional literary criticism with more experimental, human, autobiographical elements; it reminds us that modern writing often partakes of a restraint, a scepticism about the infinite or the overly emotional, and a sense of invisible boundaries within which we are always limited. But the humanism which Hulme so deplored can nevertheless play a part in critical-creative writing. This humanism, this acknowledgement of the individuality of the critic and his or her personal response to a particular work of literature, is something which Hulme pioneered in his own work, even while he was decrying humanism and romanticism as ‘spilt religion’ and as detrimental political forces. This spirit of individuality and innovation would be one possible future for literary criticism: a literary-critical discourse that is a response to the call of modernism, postmodernism, poststructuralism and – most saliently and significantly of all  – that strange phenomenon, ‘post-criticism’.

After-Black: An Afterword

Hulme’s career ended suddenly in 1917. At least, in one sense, his death was an end: it cut short a promising career as an art critic (he wrote a book on Jacob Epstein which was sadly lost), an interpreter of philosophy and a political commentator (his war notes, signed ‘North Staffs’, had seen him engage in spirited defence of the war against pacifist Bertrand Russell). But in another sense his end was his beginning. His premature death gave others an impetus to salvage his work and rescue it from obscurity, as seen in the posthumous publication of his poetic notebook fragments in the New Age in 1921, and of Speculations in 1924. As this re-evaluation has tried to show, part of Hulme’s importance lies in his connections with other thinkers and writers of the time, but he is also valuable as an individual figure, free-spirited and, for all his anti-humanist talk, deeply aware of just how much of a difference individual people – writers and artists in particular – could make in the world. His writings on the relationship between language and reality, on the value of symbols and the ‘image’, appeared at the same time as Saussure was developing the field of semiotics and Freud was establishing psychoanalysis as a mode of inquiry. He borrowed from Bergson but diverged from him in crucial respects. He is an individual and unique figure, but a figure who is always part of a wider movement, helping us to forge connections between poetry and philosophy, literature and criticism, art and literature, the past and the present. Like many modernists, his understanding of tradition enjoys a complex relationship with his championing of the new, revolutionary present. The question which concerns this present study, though, is: what next for Hulme studies? Hulme’s influence has been exhaustively studied, as has the chronology of his work; his connections with philosophy have been thoroughly examined; and his art criticism has received considerable attention.

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His relationship with modernism has been one of the most fertile and important areas of Hulme studies. As this study has endeavoured to demonstrate, Hulme’s style, and his poetic output, have been unjustly marginalized in this discussion, but so also has Hulme’s continual importance to literary criticism in its broadest and most general sense. One of Hulme’s posthumously published fragments reads: The after-black lies low along the hills Like the trailed smoke of a steamer. (Hulme 2003, 14)

If this simile suggests something that will quickly fade, like smoke into the air, then it also suggests something that is constant and recurring (the after-black, though of a different kind, will return tomorrow, just as clouds will return, albeit not the same clouds as today). Hulme has always been like a sort of ‘after-black’: lingering long after his death, mysterious, difficult to pin down and define, there one minute and then fading into the background the next. The periods of arguably his greatest popularity – principally the 1920s and 1930s, the 1950s and sporadically from the 1980s to the present – have shown that, although he may retreat into the shadows, there will always be a renascence of Hulme scholarship in the future. In one sense or another, he has never been out of literary discussions for long. But what is different about the present time is that his work sheds light on the current debate between creative and critical modes of discourse. Much modernist writing, with its emphasis on experimentation, on questioning the more formal or traditional modes of discourse, and on throwing into doubt any notion of objectivity or impartiality in terms of perception and interpretation, has something to tell us about the new mood of experimentation which is beginning to be seen in critical writing. Hulme’s writing contains these aspects too, making it thoroughbred modernist in its agenda, but in writing such unusual prose he also erases any clear boundary between his critical (or discursive) and his creative (or imaginative) writing. Furthermore, in his call for a revolution in poetry, he also allows us to glimpse the possibility for a similar ‘revolution’ (or at least rapid evolution) in criticism: criticism, too, can be ‘made new’ (to borrow from Pound’s slogan). In his willingness to ‘put himself ’ into his discursive and polemical work, he highlights a personal aspect of critical and theoretical writing, which can also be said to foreshadow

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the emerging trend for an autobiographical aspect of critical-creative writing, as discussed in the previous chapter. In their 1928 Survey of Modernist Poetry, Laura Riding and Robert Graves were dismissive of Hulme, stating that he ‘was asking a forward-looking twentieth-century generation to arm itself against romanticism’, but was wrong to reject romanticism because although ‘romantic freakishness generally quiets down to triteness, and is for this reason dull, classical freakishness is fixed and eternal from the outset; and thus eternally dull’ (Riding et al. 1969, 276–7). As I have endeavoured to show, Hulme protested his anti-romanticism a little too strongly, and at times he confused philosophical stance with poetic style. But he was the first English poet to show that a successful poem could be created in free verse out of a balance between these two competing antitheses, what he calls romanticism and classicism: poetry could be about a ‘turning loose of emotion’ (in T. S. Eliot’s phrase) but also somehow about emotion, if not recollected in tranquillity, then tranquilly and sometimes unceremoniously captured in words as and when that emotion occurred to the poet. Hulme may not have been a humanist, but his work shows the importance of humanism to all literature and all literary-critical writing; and it is only now that we are beginning to see the boundaries between critical and creative writing tested and challenged in any real sense. One of the reasons Hulme has continued to attract attention from critics is that his role in the development of modernism is always being reassessed, through the lenses of various critical theories and fashions – New Criticism, deconstruction, historicism  – and his connections with so many key modernist figures make him a necessary part of any discussion of modernist thought. But his poems deserve a wider audience, not simply because of what they tell us about modernism but because of what they tell us about modern poetry written since Hulme: experimental, restrained, often unrhymed and focusing on the small, the everyday, the trivial. This was the real birth of modern poetry, and the imagist poets who appeared a few years later were essentially developing and reiterating what Hulme’s poetry had already said. T. S. Eliot, who would take the ideas and practice of Symbolism and imagism and use them to create something vaster and richer, may have read Hulme’s Speculations enthusiastically when it appeared posthumously in 1924, but he was first captivated by the poetry, those pieces which are among ‘the most

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beautiful short poems in the language’ (Eliot 1924, 231). Paul Edwards notes of Eliot: It is not surprising that he should have admired Hulme’s poems so much, for Hulme’s image of the moon leaning over the hedge ‘like a red-face [sic] farmer’ performs the same deflation without Eliot’s lingering aura of ‘decadence’.

But Edwards is aware that there was more to value in Hulme’s poetry than just this. For him, Hulme was at the heart of something greater and more important. Again, Hulme’s poem ‘The Embankment’ is not so far removed from Wilde’s epigrammatic ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars’, and its ‘fallen gentleman’ is an archetypal relic of that era; but how different is the spirit of the poem from anything that has gone before. Hulme learnt a style from despair and taught poetry how to be modern. (Edwards 2006, 36)

To this we might append the words of Patrick McGuinness: Hulme touches on many of the artistic, political and philosophical movements of a formatively turbulent time, always close enough to the moment to convey the urgency of controversy, always detached enough to deploy informative, though hardly impartial, analyses. Hulme is also an instigator, a provocateur, he challenges and questions as much as he explains and clarifies. Poet and literary theorist, philosopher and aesthetician, political theorist and avant-garde art critic, his work illuminates the period, as well as restoring a powerful individual presence to our too-limited gallery of Modernists. (McGuinness 2003, xlii)

This is well said, and T. E. Hulme and Modernism has sought to reiterate and expand upon this reading of Hulme as an individual personality who is at the same time part of a wider movement that reaches far beyond the individual. But Hulme’s importance is not limited to the early twentieth century. The issues he engaged with are the same ones that we are still discussing today: the importance of innovation in art, the fraught relationship between language and reality and the place of the individual in society at large. What else we might learn from Hulme about being modern remains to be seen. As Edward P. Comentale has written, lyrically, movingly,

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The most valuable scholarship may just be that which can feel its way through the field – a critical method that at once evaluates as it invests the landscape of our common history. Undoubtedly, Hulme’s own intellectual and personal failures occasioned this turn, but these failures continue to plague modernity at large. Indeed, his tragedy is ours. It begins in the public sphere, it culminates in the trenches of war; it is exacerbated by mass consumption, the fall of leaders, and the death of comrades. His great melancholy spirit is also our own. We can once again drown it out with march music or let it sing. (Comentale 2006, 227)

But by way of conclusion to this afterword, I wish to break off and show how a critical-creative response to Hulme’s writing might work. By adopting a persona, and emulating Hulme’s own fragmentary writing style, I hope to show how the form and style of criticism can also help to bring out aspects of the literary text being discussed. The rough, unfinished style is in part an attempt to recreate the vibrant and energetic form of Hulme’s own writing, which was produced at an exciting time in literary history. Consider what follows, in answer to Hulme, then.

Embers: A notebook Call me Aphra. Consider what follows a conclusion or after-afterword, a modern parable, a lesson, a fragmentary fable, notes towards a (re)definition of literature.

A theory of literature Recent attempts to locate a ‘theory of literature’ are, to a greater or lesser extent, an effort by critics to plug the void left by the waning of the high moment of ‘literary theory’ in universities. I lose no time in asserting this. In the wake of all the talk of post-theory, there has been an attempt to find new ways of talking about literature using some theory or philosophy which would underpin criticism of literary texts. One prominent example is Nicholas Royle’s Veering, subtitled A Theory of Literature. But how might we postulate a theory of all literature? This is a question of the romantic versus the classical. Hulme’s distinction has not gone away – well, whatever ‘distinction’ is can be said to have.

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In the Tube – criticism In the London Underground, I find myself pondering the railway line. The Tube is a minor modernist trope suggesting modernity, the anonymity of the individual among the crowd and man’s increasing automatism in the face of technology: Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington and F. S. Flint, imagists all, would write poems about the underground railway, and the image’s famous culmination would come in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.1 The metaphor of the railway line keeps coming back to Hulme’s prose. It is worth tracking the image through his work. Consider, for instance, the way this image keeps recurring in ‘Cinders’, from the ‘rail lines and chess board’ (Hulme 2003, 21) to the ‘railway line in desert’ (22) to the admission that the ‘railway leaves out all the gaps of dirt between’ (26). As he writes elsewhere, in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’: ‘Verse is a pedestrian taking you over the ground, prose – a train which delivers you at a destination’ (Hulme 2003, 80). When we are inside the train we miss much of the ‘cindery reality’ beneath us, the mud and dirt which is the real world, we get carried away, carried over it, we lose touch and sight of reality. We are cocooned inside the carriage of language until we arrive at the desired meaning – our destination. This is even truer of the Tube, with all that subterranean dirt and mud, and the cinders that lie beneath us, hidden from view. But when we walk, we feel the earth beneath us, experience as raw, lived and felt experience – but we are also, as Hulme would have liked, down to earth, walking over the earth. I am losing myself in the earth . . . But perhaps it might be worthwhile pondering the image of the Underground in relation to modern literary criticism: what it hides from view, its concern with getting us towards a destination (the critic’s conclusion), its sense of theoretical underpinning which guides it along its track (theory = a train of thought), its desire to go beneath the surface, to travel a different yet parallel path to the text it discusses. Discursive argument always partakes of the railway, in seeking to chart a smooth journey or track through the writer’s argument, leaving out the inconvenient dirt and detritus glimpsed in between each key stage of the argument. How to unearth this earth, to bring to light this dirt, revel in it, acknowledge what modernist literature began to acknowledge over a 100 years ago: life is not neat, life as lived is a matter of walking and stumbling over dirt, not of travelling smoothly over things. Woolf knew this. Eliot and Joyce knew this. Hulme was there first: he saw the attempts to smooth over the

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dirt in all human constructions. What if a critic wants to walk the line, trudge along the underground railway tracks in the London Tube by night, cleaning the tracks, ridding them of dirt but at the same time smoothing the way for a clear argument. Criticism as both dirt and cleaning, an act of confronting reality and yet tidying reality as one goes. Nocturnal workers, undergoing subterranean night walks, down among the black dirt and ash, among the embers of real life, lucubratory cleaners.

Waste ‘Cinders’ is the prose Waste Land, before The Waste Land. A work of modernist fragmentation which acknowledges the arbitrary nature of life, the chaos of existence and the search for meaning, order and purpose among the cinders which art and philosophy embody. And criticism? Perhaps this can learn from this: Hulme’s philosophical musings in ‘Cinders’ have something important to tell us, but it is not just a matter of the what but the how: his Nietzschean aphorisms and fragmentary observations reflect the chaotic nature of everyday life more faithfully than criticism or philosophy usually manages. Style as important – for criticism as much as philosophy. As the Metaphysical poets Donne and Marvell would be to Eliot, so the poetry of Herrick was to Hulme: like Eliot, he found justification for what we wanted to say in the poets of the seventeenth century. Criticism may be a prose art which is distinct from poetry, but it might nevertheless learn from Hulme’s view of poetry – especially if we are talking about creative criticism, or experimental criticism, which seeks to fuse the two disciplines together. Hulme’s talk of prose being like algebra  – literally from the Arabic, we remember, meaning ‘reunion of broken parts’. An attempt, in other words, we might say, as an aside, to enforce order and unity on something that is by its nature fragmentary, disordered, chaotic. Like Hulme’s theory of poetry: ‘I believe that while the world cosmically cannot be reduced to unity as science proclaims (in the postulate of uniformity), yet on the contrary poetry can. At least its methods follow certain easily defined routes. (Anyone can be taught how to use poetry)’ (Hulme 2003, 37). A delicious aside, that, a fine thesis or parenthesis: anyone can be taught how to use poetry, like a potter’s wheel or a paintbrush. But can everyone use it well? And what about other written

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arts  – criticism, for instance? Where has the recent creative influence in modern critical writing come from? In Tube on way to conference at Imperial, a thought strikes me like wind in the desert: what is the purpose of criticism, now?2 And suddenly, I find myself carried along on a different train of thought, wondering about the rise in creative writing within the university, and the implications this has for conventional literary criticism as we have known it since Hulme’s day – when, after all, it was in its infancy as an academic profession. This is as you had supposed. Critical-creative writing as example of parafluence: for if one were to point to two of the most important influences in the rise of the creative element in modern criticism, one could do worse than single out (1) creative writing courses in universities and (2) the afterlife of poststructuralist literary theory. As John Schad has written, there is a need for ‘the truly critical critic  – or, to be paradoxical, the critic as critic; the critic who is a critic of criticism as conventionally understood, or misunderstood’ (Schad 2011, ix). Numerous critics, in the wake of the high point of ‘theory’ in universities and in response to the development of creative writing as an academic discipline, are independently or only semi-dependently coming to the conclusion that the traditional form of literary criticism which has been practised for the last 100 years is now coming to an end . . . or, at least, that its monopoly as academic discourse is starting to be questioned. This, then, would be a beginning as well as an end. At conference on ‘Great Writing’ in London, I find myself wondering what makes ‘great criticism’. Mistake of thinking creativity does not and cannot enter into it. Yes, we should still principally be concerned with elucidating the text and revealing the creative work of the author, but we should not rule out our own creativity in the act of reading. How many times do we read something into a text and think, ‘That’s good, but I wonder if the idea was the author’s or is it my own doing?’ We cannot ignore this possibility. That is disingenuous. I can remember upon arriving that I found myself locked outside the Huxley Building at Imperial by my own stupidity, and recall thinking how apt a metaphor that was for academic writing: a critic denied access to the inner sanctum of this world called ‘creative writing’, yet more through his own failings than that of the inner world itself. Might not a creative writer feel the same misgivings? One needs automatic doors . . .

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‘But in rhetoric and expositional prose we get words divorced from any real vision. Rhetoric and emotion – here the connection is different.’ So, Hulme goes on, ‘perhaps literary expression is from Real to Real with all the intermediate forms keeping their real value. In expositional reasoning, the intermediate terms have only counter value’ (Hulme 2003, 38). Yet is this enough? For expositional prose might move from real to real too, it seems. ‘The ideal of modern prose is to be all counters, i.e. to pass to conclusions without thinking’ (38). Yet is there anything worse for literary criticism than the critic passing to conclusions ‘without thinking’? We must think about this. Perhaps we need an image, or sequence of images, to convey our impression of the literary text under discussion. As you get in Hulme’s poems, which are often about the art of poetry itself. And London. Hulme is the typical modernist: one who has come to London from a foreign land (even if, unlike Pound and Eliot, it is only from the rural land of north Staffordshire) and who therefore sees London differently from the native, sees it as a world of symbols and new images, new associations. Given the recent interest in the urban, and particularly London, in literary and cultural studies, Hulme’s musings on London as a source of modernist images are peculiarly striking and significant. What might a critical-creative, modernist-inflected study of London look like? Perhaps this is the thing: modernist theory of literature was often a sort of deification of the image, because the image was the way in which one expressed something. As Hulme points out, no point talking about ‘love’ or ‘hate’: one needs definite sensations, not abstract words (Hulme 2003, 49). Even when engaging with the personal, one needs to get this across to the reader through images that can be more generally perceived and understood. This is true of literature, which – Hulme argues – should record specific images which will reach us and arouse an emotional response. This idea would be developed into the ‘objective correlative’ by T. S. Eliot (possibly in a form of unconscious parafluence) and has often returned in different guises and under different names. But perhaps criticism, too, needs an image. In seeking to do away with the conventional form and metre of poetry, Hulme was aware that he was running the risk of dissolving the boundaries between prose and verse. He anticipated this objection: The criticism is sure to be made that when you have abolished the regular syllabled line as the unit of poetry, you have turned it into prose. Of course

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this is perfectly true of a great quantity of modern verse. In fact one of the great blessings of the abolition of regular metre would be that it would at once expose all this sham poetry. (Hulme 2003, 65)

One still needs a distinction between poetry and prose, but the distinction does not come from form alone, but from style, from subject, from mood. Perhaps it is time for literary criticism to view itself as a sort of fantasia. Fantasia is defined by the OED, after all, as a musical ‘composition in a style in which form is subservient to fancy’. We think we know the form of criticism – so-called formal writing, its register largely unaltered for the last few centuries – but Hulme asks that we rethink any preconceived notions of what the act of criticism or ‘literary theory’ should be. How to get this. I would like to end by saying that, after a 100 years of free verse in English poetry, we are in for another development: a growth in prose poetry. Prose poems are by no means a new phenomenon, but perhaps a sort of metapoetry might be the new contribution to this field. Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford Madox Ford), one of the bright lights of imagist verse, expressed the opinion nearly a 100 years ago that ‘it would be of immense service to humanity if the Anglo-Saxon world could agree that all creative literature is Poetry; that prose is a form as well adapted for the utterance of poetry as verse’ (Hueffer 1921, 116). Thinking of parafluence, while walking down street. Another example of parafluence is seen in Hulme’s ‘Cinders’ when he talks of the ‘religious attitude’ and his rejection of absolute certainty in philosophy and art: ‘The truth is that there are no ultimate principles, upon which the whole of knowledge can be built once and for ever as upon a rock’ (Hulme 2003, 29). Instead we have only cinders, ash-heaps, dust, dirt, faeces and mud: ‘But thank God for the long note of the bugle, which moves all the world bodily out of the cinders and the mud’ (31). And ‘the eye is in the mud, the eye is mud’ (32). Such a juxtaposition between mud-dwelling squalidity and rock-based certainty would also feed into T. S. Eliot’s poem, ‘The Hippopotamus’, a few years later when the titular animal rests ‘in the mud’, while the Church of England is founded ‘upon a rock’ (Eliot 1990, 51). Religion is the rock, the artificial cultural construction that provides order and meaning to the world; the real world of nature the world of mud and dirt. No reality but in the mud behind the church, the mud beneath the rock.

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Quantum criticism A lot of what we have been discussing might be called quantum criticism. Quantum criticism is only tentatively suggested: I cannot be sure it exists at all, like a subatomic particle whose existence is hypothetical, like a reading of a poem whose ‘truth’ or ‘value’ is only ever guessable, never measurable. Quantum criticism would be an offshoot of Thing Theory  – a little extra thing, we might say, in homage to the origins of the word ‘quantum’ (Latin, ‘how much’, but also the very earliest sense of quantum: ‘Something that has quantity’). Perhaps this is not so arbitrary as it first sounds: it certainly relates to Hulme, who worked for a time as a correspondent for the scientific journal Nature, and in April 1911 travelled to Bologna for the International Congress of Philosophy, which, as Robert Bernard Hass observes, ‘focused upon the philosophical problems that modern physics generated’ (Hass 2002, 42). This aspect of the congress has received less attention in biographies of Hulme, undoubtedly because Bergson’s presence at the conference overshadows other aspects of the event. Literature and quanta – a link? Perhaps such discussions of the nature of reality have relevance to quantum physics. At the very least, the quantum metaphor might help us to establish the basis of Hulme’s beliefs concerning language and the real world. To start with, consider the ‘atomic’ nature of the world as perceived by Hulme in ‘Cinders’, where all is chaos and uncertainty. As Tim Armstrong has observed, Modernism [. . .] works within a radically altered scientific field; a world, as popularizers like Gerald Heard told their audiences, which seems to have dissolved into elegant paradox. [.  .  .] It is against this background  – Hulme’s cinder-heap, Eliot’s Waste Land, Wallace Stevens’s ‘The Man in the Dump’ – that we need to see the tentative ordering of so many modernist texts. (Armstrong 2005, 121)

Some work has already been conducted into the relationship between quantum theory and modernist poetry: Daniel Albright has described how ‘the methods of physicists helped to inspire poets to search for the elementary particles of which poems were constructed – poememes, one might call them’ (Albright 1997, 1). It was specifically among modernist poets that such a search took place, as Albright’s study explores.

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But then there is criticism and literary theory, which is also Hulme’s metier, and the implications that quantum mechanics of the early twentieth century had for the business of reading poems. I take this example and endeavour to circle it from all positions simultaneously, like an electron, elegantly negotiating the vast and empty space of the atom. I turn to Jonathan Bate, who has argued that ‘the innovations of Heisenberg and Schrödinger, so lucidly mediated by Eddington, led [William] Empson to bring about changes in our mode of thought about literature’ (Bate 2008, 313). As Bate goes on: Empson is Modernism’s Einstein among literary critics. His ‘both/and’ is the twentieth century’s most powerful contribution to the understanding of Shakespeare because it is both a microscopic and a macroscopic way of seeing. It begins with ambiguous words and syntaxes – think of them as the wavicles which are the literary work’s smallest unit of energy – but it can be extended to the work as a whole. It enabled Empson to apply an ‘uncertainty principle’ to every aspect of Shakespeare. (Bate 2008, 316)

Hulme’s writings can be viewed as another contribution to this field: the image both is and is not a true representation of the thing being captured, just as Empson’s ‘both/and’ ambiguity allows for two differing meanings to co-exist in a literary work. The moon is not the moon and the red-faced farmer is not simply a farmer; instead we get a new image that is neither and both of these, a Schrödinger’s cat of the image. This is also a matter of parafluence: Hulme did not have to absorb quantum theory directly to arrive at his conclusions; they were simply in the air at the time. The imagist image is a form of quantum: images are quanta, little units of literary energy which interact with each other.

Critical-creative That modernist writing can teach us about postmodern literary criticism, and that literary criticism can be enriched by absorbing and aping the style of great modernist writers, I strongly believe. No (post)modernist literary criticism without modernism. (But which modernism, or whose?)

The desert All life as embers, Beckettian embers, chaos and disorder. Literature as a more ordered chaos out of which the critic must make even more order:

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finding patterns, unearthing hidden significance, making connections. Briefly these are gathered up into the ashbins, but then the wind blows them away again, rearranging them, and our task begins again, of sifting through the embers, always embers, trying to make sense of the scattered chaosmos of the world.

Notes Introduction 1 See, for instance, Royle 2011, Schad 2012 and Schad and Tearle 2011. 2 For this reason, I will be using Patrick McGuinness’s edition of Hulme’s Selected Writings to reference all of Hulme’s writings I refer to, with the exception of those few texts (some of the essays collected together in the 1924 volume Speculations, for instance) which are not included in the Selected Writings. Karen Csengeri’s volume The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), while more comprehensive in terms of the prose writings, publishes just eight of Hulme’s poems, whereas McGuinness includes nearly all of the poems and fragments. 3 I discuss the issue of influence in relation to Hulme and Eliot in more depth in Chapter 3. 4 Hulme refers to Nietzsche’s work throughout his writings: see, for instance, his reference to ‘Nietzsche’s image of the tightrope walker’ in ‘Cinders’ (Hulme 2003: 20), or, in ‘Notes on Language and Style’, his mention of ‘Nietzsche and his ambition to say everything in a paragraph’ (Hulme 2033: 56). 5 The prefix para- denotes ‘beside’ or ‘alongside of ’ and thus better captures the idea of convergent evolution of ideas I want to convey, as opposed to in- which suggests a provider and a recipient (ideas flow in to somebody, rather than alongside somebody’s own ideas). Of course, in choosing para- I am committing the sin which linguistic purists and classicists often lament, the sin of hybridization. The prefix para- is Greek, while -fluence is Latin. However, the only viable alternative would be ‘confluence’, from the Latin con- meaning ‘with’, but the word ‘confluence’ has too strong an association with geography (the confluence of a river), which influence (and, naturally, parafluence) does not share. 6 The word ‘parafluence’ is not an entirely original coinage: Julie Chiu is credited with inventing the word, fittingly enough in a paper on Ezra Pound, delivered at the 16th Biennial Ezra Pound Conference in 1995. The full title of Chiu’s paper was ‘Pound and Chinese Modernism: Influence, Refluence, or “Parafluence”’. I have been unable to find Chiu’s paper published anywhere, and the word appears to lie in relative obscurity, although my attempt to resurrect it here with a similar meaning to that evidently intended in Chiu’s paper may enable the word to gain a wider currency. Chiu’s word is quoted by Robert Hughes in his book Cavalcanti (Hughes 2003: 132). However, I was not aware of this previous use of the word until a Google search

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alerted me to it. Having coined the word, I then typed it into the internet search engine to see if it had been invented before, and discovered Hughes’ book. The word was thus independently coined by two different people: a prime example of parafluence in itself. 7 As recounted by Comentale and Gasiorek in their ‘Introduction’, p. 2.

1.  Look-out man: Hulme’s theories 1 I am indebted to Robert Ferguson for this suggestion: see Ferguson (2002: 280). 2 I explore the ‘romantic’ aspect of Hulme’s poetic images in more detail in the next chapter.

2.  Star-eaten: Hulme’s romantic images 1 William Harmon has suggested that the first four lines of ‘Autumn’ were influenced by a sentence from Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd: ‘It was with some surprise that she saw Gabriel’s face rising like the moon behind the hedge’ – see Harmon (2003: 53). 2 Compare Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Sad Steps’, published in his 1974 volume High Windows (Larkin 1999: 26). For a discussion of Larkin’s poetry in relation to imagism, see Whalen 1981. 3 Ralph Vaughan Williams’s ‘The Lark Ascending’, voted Britain’s favourite piece of music in a 2011 poll, would be composed in its first form in 1914, its title – drawn from the work of Victorian poet George Meredith – perfectly capturing the apparent sense of boundless infinitude of the lark’s flight. 4 See also Ferguson (2002: 49–50), for a discussion of the different drafts of ‘A City Sunset’. 5 See my discussion of the two different drafts of ‘Sunset’, in the previous chapter. To offer one further example: the version of ‘Susan Ann and Immortality’ reprinted in Michael Roberts’ T. E. Hulme has ‘finally keen’, while the version Patrick McGuinness prints in his Selected Writings has ‘fixedly keen’. 6 J. B. Harmer writes that ‘Mana Aboda’ was written on a postcard (dated 7 September 1909) which Hulme sent to F. S. Flint: see Harmer (1975: 55). For the reference to ‘Conversion’ being ‘written as a blackboard exercise’, see Hughes (1931: 19). 7 I am indebted to Patrick McGuinness for pointing out that Hulme misquotes the lines from Shakespeare: see Hulme (2003: 225). McGuinness also points out (Hulme 2003: 225) that Hulme misquotes Webster in the same essay (p. 75). 8 For more on this dialect term, see Bate (1999: 60–2).

Notes

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  9 For a discussion of T. S. Eliot’s use of the Shakespearean fragment, see Tearle 2012. 10 Peter Jones quotes and discusses these lines in his ‘Introduction’ to Imagist Poetry, p. 32. 11 The issue of Hulme’s religion is a complex one. Although he appears to use original sin in a cultural sense that is informed by Darwinism and philosophical development, rather than a strictly Catholic sense, he also had, as Ferguson notes, ‘a real interest in Catholicism’ – for more on this, see Ferguson (2002: 109). 12 J. B. Harmer, in his study of imagist poetry, suggests some of the afterlives of imagism. See his concluding chapter, ‘The Punished Ground’, in Harmer (1975: 184–93). 13 Pound published Joyce’s poem ‘I Hear an Army’ in the inaugural imagist anthology, Des Imagistes, in 1914.

3.  Noon-heat: Hulme’s contemporaries 1 2 3 4

This story is also summarized by Robert Ferguson – see Ferguson (2002: 4–5). See, for instance, Edwards (2006: 36). See, for instance, Ferguson (2002: 61) and Maddrey (2009: 65). For more about Eliot’s possible knowledge of Hulme and his writing, see Schuchard (2003: 63–9). 5 Royle (2003: 99): ‘The concursor would be the strange contemporary. He or she might be completely or largely unknown to the writer or thinker in question. Close yet distant, familiar but unfamiliar, concursors can have strangely similar concerns.’ And in an additional note: ‘The concursor is a figure of the strange contemporary and the strangeness of the contemporary. Hence the peculiar future anterior of the bullet point: Freud will have been haunted by Lawrence’ (105 n. 56). 6 See Schneidau (1969: 38–56) and Pound (1939: 15). 7 Parafluence does not sidestep the issue of proof so much as question it. Mathematicians would say that no categorical ‘proof ’ can exist outside of the world of mathematics (something Hulme, who trained in mathematics, would have understood), and that all historians and critics can talk about is ‘corroboration’ or ‘evidence’ that strongly indicates support of the hypothesis or interpretation being proposed. With Hulme, it may be possible to prove or corroborate the idea that he was influenced by Bergson, since he wrote about Bergson’s work, translated one of his books, and refers to him repeatedly in his thought. But what about Hulme and Nietzsche? This is where parafluence is important for directing us towards the other people in Hulme’s circle, to show how Hulme may have indirectly come into contact with Nietzsche’s ideas through a process of cultural osmosis, acting at several removes.

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  8 Perhaps the most celebrated example of parafluence from the world of science is the case of Charles Darwin. Darwin’s voyage aboard the Beagle to South America in the years 1831–6 undoubtedly played an important part in his formulation of the theory of natural selection, but so did his reading, chiefly of Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–3) and the works of Thomas Malthus. Darwin formulated and developed his theory of evolution by natural selection over several decades, gathering evidence that would eventually be published as On the Origin of Species in 1859. Meanwhile, Alfred Russel Wallace hit upon exactly the same theory independently, having studied the natural world in the Malay Peninsula – and having read Lyell and Malthus, just as Darwin had. One did not influence the other directly here, but they both assimilated the work of the same writers, conducted experiments in the same field and happened to join the dots together to form the same conclusion at a similar point in history. The same might be argued of Hulme and modernism. Charting his influence on other writers of the time may be tempting, but it can lead us only so far in an analysis of Hulme’s importance. What is more productive is the light that parafluence can shed on Hulme’s relationships with other writers and artists of the time, and the way they collectively ‘invented’ modernism.   9 Hulme did not in fact found the Poets’ Club, as Flint claims: an example of the dangers of tracing direct influence among individuals when Hulme is involved. The issue of the Poets’ Club is dealt with in Harmer (1975: 18–19). 10 As Pound writes in his Guide to Kulchur: ‘When a writer’s matter is stated with such entirety and with such clarity there is no place left for the explaining critic. Where the matter is of so stark a nature and so clamped to reality, the eulogist looks like an ass . . . poem after poem of Hardy’s leaves one with nowt more to say.’ See Pound (1960: 285). Catherine Maxwell has written, Pound ‘apparently saw in Hardy’s poetry a version of his own Imagism’ – see Maxwell (2008: 197). A number of poems by D. H. Lawrence appeared in imagist anthologies, even though many critics have questioned his place in the group, and Lawrence never thought of himself as a member of the imagists – see Thacker (2011: 12). 11 From a 1936 lecture in Dublin; cited by Christopher Ricks in his ‘Introduction’ to Eliot’s Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917 – see Ricks (1996: xxiv). 12 The Pound quotation is cited in Harmer (1975: 167).

4.  Marking-time: Hulme’s influence 1 For a treatment of Hulme’s attempts to square Bergson’s philosophy with his own anti-humanist stance, see Matz (2006: 113–32).

Notes

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After-black: An afterword 1 For more on this link between modernism and the London Underground, see Welsh 2010. For an illuminating account of imagism and the Tube, see Thacker (2003: 80–114). 2 The occasion was a real one, what might grandly be called a fragment of autobiography: the conference was the annual international ‘Great Writing’ symposium on creative writing held at Imperial College London on 16–17 June 2012. The paper I presented was one of few critical pieces at the conference: titled ‘Star-eaten’, it explored many of the ideas present in this interlude, in similar fragmentary fashion.

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Index Albright, Daniel  141 Aldington, Richard  70, 74, 136 Aristotle  38 Armstrong, Tim  141 Arnold, Matthew  73, 111 Barthes, Roland  123, 126 Bate, Jonathan  142 Bateson, F. W.  60–1 Beasley, Rebecca  1, 14, 34–5, 52–3, 104, 107, 118–19 Beckett, Samuel  142 Bergson, Henri  1, 11, 13, 18, 24–5, 27, 30, 34, 36–7, 48–9, 51, 53, 63, 84, 86, 90, 92–7, 103, 108, 110, 117–18, 122, 124, 128, 131, 141 Blake, William  7, 127 Bloom, Harold  99 Bradley, F. H.  86 Brittan, Simon  5 Brooker, Jewel Spears  8–9 Brown, Bill  111–13 Browning, Robert  61–2, 117 Campbell, Joseph  100 Chesterton, G. K.  121 Cixous, Helene  116 Cohen, Scott  115 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor  47–9, 59, 95 Comentale, Edward P.  9, 14, 15, 116, 123, 134–5 Conrad, Joseph  123 Copjec, Jean  92–3 critical-creative writing  1, 7, 61, 113–23, 126 Csengeri, Karen  13 Dante  98 Darwin, Charles  10–11 Davie, Donald  108 Deleuze, Gilles  115 Derrida, Jacques  9–10, 116, 123

Donne, John  137 Dryden, John  46 Dukes, Ashley  8, 105 Eagleton, Terry  44 Edwards, Paul  2, 4, 68, 134 Eliot, T. S.  1, 2, 6, 8–9, 13, 14, 15–16, 20, 42, 43, 66–7, 69, 70, 83–92, 98–9, 101, 102, 107, 108, 115, 118, 119, 128, 133–4, 137, 139 ‘Cousin Nancy’  72 ‘Death of St Narcissus, The’  86–8 Four Quartets  136 ‘Hippopotamus, The’  140 ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The’  15, 18, 22, 24, 28, 79 ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’  24, 125 Waste Land, The  24, 69, 88–9, 98, 121, 137, 141 Emerson, Ralph Waldo  27 Empson, William  89–90, 128 Epstein, Jacob  11, 12, 38, 103, 105–6, 131 Fenollosa, Ernest  109 Ferguson, Robert  13, 38, 52, 58, 69, 84, 92, 124 Fitzgerald, F. Scott  102 Flanagan, Kathleen  45 Flint, F. S.  20, 70, 74, 81, 89, 99–100, 136 Ford, Ford Madox  98, 140 Freud, Sigmund  131 Gage, John  66, 100–1 Gasiorek, Andrzej  9, 14, 123 Gibson, Matthew  1, 93–4, 95, 103 Gillies, Mary Ann  13, 90, 92 Gordon, George  44 Graves, Robert  133 Gross, Harvey  40–1 Guattari, Félix  115

158

Index

H. D.  64, 70, 74, 81, 89 Hardy, Thomas  101, 103 Harmer, J. B.  2, 14, 31, 36, 37, 49, 72, 82, 94, 100, 114–15 Hartman, Geoffrey  116 Hass, Robert Bernard  141 Hastings, Beatrice  12 Herrick, Robert  31–3, 77, 137 Horace  46 Housman, A. E.  60–1 Howarth, Peter  94 Hughes, Glenn  2, 49 Hulme, T. E.,  ‘Above the Dock’  41, 52, 54–5, 65, 71, 74, 99 ‘Autumn’  29, 51–3, 65, 71, 74, 99, 103, 106 ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’  27 ‘Cinders’  7, 9, 34–5, 84, 115–17, 136–7, 140, 141 ‘City Sunset, A’  20, 42 ‘Embankment, The’  28, 29, 41, 64–70, 72, 75, 86, 96, 114, 121, 134 ‘Mana Aboda’  20–1, 29, 32, 41, 58, 65 ‘Modern Art and Its Philosophy’  105–6, 126 ‘Notes on Language and Style’  7, 23, 26, 28, 58, 76, 83, 111, 115, 117, 119–20 ‘Romanticism and Classicism’  4, 6, 16–19, 25–6, 29–32, 40, 46, 48, 50, 54, 59, 85, 93, 96, 99, 104, 107–10, 136 Speculations  5, 13, 14, 27, 59, 86, 87, 89, 107–8, 131, 133 Hynes, Sam  13, 86, 87 imagism  1–2, 7, 8, 11, 14, 16–17, 23–4, 26, 28, 32–3, 36, 39, 42, 43, 46, 50, 56–8, 61, 64, 66, 70, 74–82, 85, 88–94, 96, 99–102, 104, 112–13, 126, 133, 136, 140, 142 James, William  1, 34, 93–4, 95, 103 Joyce, James  42, 58, 82, 91, 101–2, 136 Keats, John  19, 63–4, 77, 99 Keenan, Thomas  6 Kenner, Hugh  102 Kermode, Frank  3, 33, 49, 94–5 Kuhn, Elizabeth  10, 117

Lacan, Jacques  123 Laing, R. D.  114 Lawrence, D. H.  101 Lentricchia, Frank  108 Levenson, Michael  5, 13, 52, 98 Lewis, Pericles  74, 85 Lewis, Wyndham  11, 105 Lowell, Amy  81 Luther, Martin  78 McDowell, Robert  40–1 McGuinness, Patrick  5, 120, 134 Maddrey, Joseph  119 Marvell, Andrew  137 Matz, Jesse  47 Milton, John  43, 44, 60–1, 77 Monro, Walter  75–6 Nietzsche, Friedrich  10–11, 94, 103, 117, 125, 137 Olsen, Flemming  14 Orage, Alfred Richard  119 parafluence  10–11, 98–106, 122–3, 140 Pope, Alexander  46 post-criticism  117–18, 129 Pound, Ezra  6, 8–9, 11, 14, 16, 17, 24, 42, 56, 64, 69–70, 80–1, 86–7, 89–92, 98, 100–4, 107, 109, 118, 132, 136, 139 ‘In a Station of the Metro’  74–5 Practical Criticism  107–8, 118–19 quantum theory  141–2 Quinton, Anthony  125 Raleigh, Sir Walter  44, 61–2 Ransom, John Crowe  108 Read, Herbert  5, 13, 14, 59, 78 Richards, I. A.  107–8, 118–19, 128 Ricks, Christopher  61 Riding, Laura  133 Roberts, Jonathan  127 Roberts, Michael  2, 11, 13, 17, 57, 81, 89, 90, 95 Robinson, Alan  40, 50, 58, 123 Rossetti, Christina  71 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  124 Royle, Nicholas  86, 116, 135

Index Saussure, Ferdinand de  108–9, 122–3, 131 Schad, John  116, 127, 138 schizophrenia  114–15 Schneidau, Herbert  98 Schrödinger, Ernst  142 Schuchard, Ronald  87 Schwartz, Sanford  11, 91–2, 94, 95 Selver, Paul  51 Shakespeare, William  23, 43–4, 59–63, 64, 117, 142 Sherry, Vincent  43 Sinclair, May  76–8 Sisson, C. H.  7–8 Squire, Sir John  12 Stevenson, Randall  102–3 Storer, Edward  39, 74, 85, 99–100 Suckling, John  77 Symbolism  36, 64, 74, 76, 86, 89–90, 94, 97, 133

Tennyson, Alfred  71, 99 Thacker, Andrew  92 Thing Theory  111–13, 141 Thompson, Ewa M.  107–8 Trilling, Lionel  103 Trotter, David  103–4, 124 Ulmer, Gregory L.  117–18, 128 Whistler, James McNeill  113 Whitman, Walt  58 Whitworth, Michael H.  67 Wilde, Oscar  126, 134 Woolf, Virginia  58, 82, 91, 103, 136 Wordsworth, William  19, 45, 49, 127 Worringer, Wilhelm  105 Wright, Orville  23 Wright, Wilbur  23

159