By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
T. E. Hulme (1883-1917) was an influential poet and thinker in the first few years of the twentieth century. He left behind only a handful of short poems – our pick of which can be read here – but he revolutionised the way English poetry approached issues of rhyme, metre, and imagery. Few before Hulme had thought seriously to liken the moon to a child’s balloon or the ruddy face of a farmer, but Hulme was resolute that poetry, in the hands of the Victorians, had become stale and old, and needed to be reinvented.