Hulme, Thomas Ernest

(1883-1917)

   He was born at Endon, Staffordshire, the eldest son of a wealthy family of landowners, and educated at Newcastle-under-Lyme grammar school where, in the school debating society he was known as "the Whip." He went on to St. John's College, Cambridge, to read mathematics, but in 1904 was expelled for repeated unruly behavior. He enrolled at University College, London, in October 1904 to read biology and physics, and continued to spend much time in Cambridge attending undergraduate lectures in philosophy. In 1906, he withdrew from his studies altogether and spent a year traveling in Canada, then he went to Belgium to improve his French and taught English in Brussels. He enlisted into the Army soon after the outbreak of war in 1914 and later transferred to the Royal Marines Artillery. He was killed manning a gun on the Belgian coast. He is one of the members of the Imagist School. Much of his work survived only in notebooks. Some of his poems: "Above the Dock," "As a Fowl," "Autumn," "Conversion," "Embankment," "Fragments," "Image," "Trenches: St Eloi."

   Sources: Antholog y of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry. Keith Tuma, ed. Oxford University Press, 2001. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite DVD, 2006. The Literary Encyclopedia (www.LitEncyc.com). Oldpoetry (www.oldpoetry.com). The Collected Writings of T.E. Hulme. Karen Csengeri, ed. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1994. The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry. Jon Silkin, ed. Penguin Books, 1979.