T.E. Hulme - Fragments & Other Poems

T.E. Hulme - Fragments & Other Poems
Public Domain Poets #3 | Publicdomainpoets.com
'Fragments & Other Poems' brings together a small collection of around 30 of Hulme's poems, including a selection of 'fragments' (published posthumously in 1921) and verses from 'The Complete Poetical Works of T.E. Hulme' (first published as an afterword to Ezra Pound's 'Ripostes', in 1912). New edition designed, edited, and selected by Dick Whyte.
I walked into the wood in June
And suddenly beauty, like a thick scented veil,
Stifled me,
Tripped me up, tight round my limbs,
Arrested me.
T.E. HULME (1883-1917) was born in Endon, a small village in the district of Stafordshire, just outside Stoke-on-Trent, in England. Hulme studied mathematics and philosophy at Cambridge, and became interested in poetry around 1907. He joined The Poets' Club in 1908, but after a disagreement left to start his own writers' circle in 1909 - later dubbed the 'School of Images' - a group of experimental poets based in London, also including Edward Storer, F.S. Flint, Florence Farr, and Joseph Campbell (et al.); influenced by French vers libre (i.e. 'free verse'), Japanese poetic forms like tanka and haikai, and Henri Bergson's metaphysics of the 'image'.
The after-black lies low along the hills
Like the trailed smoke of a steamer.
Hulme later abandoned poetry, to focus on philosophy and art criticism. He left for WWI in 1914, and was killed in 1917 after being directly struck by a large shell. While Hulme published just 6 poems in his lifetime, his ideas were revived by the Imagists in 1913 - under the leadership of Ezra Pound, and then Amy Lowell - and his work proved to be a significant forerunner to the 'new verse' movements of the 1910s.
Old houses were scaffolding once,
and workmen whistling.
Public Domain Press is dedicated to producing contemporary editions of out-of-print poets and poetry collections, particularly with regard to compressed and fragmented 'free verse' from the late-1800s and early-1900s. All poems start as facsimiles - to preserve the original fonts - which are then cleaned up, edited for consistency, and spaciously laid-out, adorned with borders, illustrations, and ornaments from the books and magazines they originally appeared in. These are not "reprints" of previously existing books, but newly crafted collections, lovingly edited from public domain material, for the serious poetry lover.