Patrick McGuinness
T.E. Hulme, Extreme Moderate

T.E. Hulme is one of British modernism's most remarkable figures. Poet, thinker, philosopher, art theorist, political polemicist and general all-round intellectual pugilist, Hulme was one of the liveliest intellects of his era. His reputation for bold and aggressive views and often threatening debating tactics (he once proposed saving time in an argument by administering 'a little personal violence' to his opponent ... ), Hulme was also the author of what Eliot described as 'some of the most beautiful short poems in the English language', a democrat, and an extraordinarily perceptive and humane thinker about art, politics and society. Hulme was of course brash, forceful, extreme and unyielding in his views. But he was also a kind of modernist dreamer, who saw the poetry of the world's brokenness.


Biography

Patrick McGuinness was born in Tunisia in 1968, and is now Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Oxford University. He is the author of three books of poetry, The Canals of Mars (2004), 19th Century Blues (2007), and Jilted City (2010), and a novel, The Last 100 Days (2011).
The Canals of Mars (2004), was shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Prize, and translated into Italian in 2006 as I Canali di Marte (Mobydick editore), and Jilted City was a Book Society Recommendation and appears in Italian as L'età della sedia vuota, with Il Ponte del Sale in 2011.
His academic books include T.E. Hulme: Selected Writings, Carcanet, 1998; Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre, Oxford University Press, 1999; Symbolism, Decadence and the "Fin de Siècle": French and European Perspectives, University of Exeter Press, 2000; Anthologie de la Poésie Symboliste et Décadente, Les Belles Lettres, 2001; J-K Huysmans/Against Nature (editor) Penguin, 2003.