New Philosophy of Literature by Hagger Nicholas

Author:Hagger, Nicholas
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781846949463
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing

Hulme wrote more than 20 short Imagistic poems, five of which were published in New Age (January 1912) and reprinted at the end of Ezra Pound’s Ripostes (1912). (Pound wrote, “The first use of the word ‘Imagiste’ was in my note to T.E. Hulme’s five poems, printed at the end of my Ripostes in the autumn of 1912.”)11 Bergson’s theory of art, his view of “intensive manifolds”, led Hulme to invent Imagism. After his early death in 1917 the Romantic poet and critic Herbert Read collected his papers and published them posthumously as Speculations.

Speculations includes an essay on ‘Humanism and the Religious Attitude’, which held that there were opposed conceptions of man: the religious and the humanist. The religious attitude, which dominated from Augustine to the Renaissance and can be found in Byzantine art, sees man as limited and imperfect, and in terms of absolute values as endowed with original sin. The humanist attitude, which dominated from the Renaissance to the early 20th century, sees man as fundamentally good, not imperfect, and in its relative values evil and sin disappear. Hulme held that on the evidence of a change of sensibility found in modern art, the humanist period was coming to an end. The humanist attitude was being replaced by an anti-humanist, religious attitude in which man will again be subordinated to absolute values, i.e. the Light. These absolute values hold that man is not perfect but is capable of approaching perfection. This essay of Hulme’s reflects the metaphysical aspect of the fundamental theme’s quest for Reality in terms of the absolute values of the Light.

In his essay ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, Hulme held that “after a hundred years of Romanticism, we are in for a classical revival” in which fresh and surprising metaphors of fancy would replace imagination. (In his poem ‘Autumn’ Hulme wrote: “I walked abroad,/And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge/Like a red-faced farmer.” The moon as farmer is an example of such a fresh, surprising use of fancy.) Hulme prophesied that a period of dry, hard, classical verse was coming. Man would be seen as a Neoclassical “fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be got out of him.” The Romantic view that “man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstance”, he argued, has been replaced by the Neoclassical view that “he is intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent.” The fixed part of man, Hulme maintained, believes in God, and when there is lack of belief, then man becomes a god as in Dostoevsky’s Possessed, and instead of belief in Heaven there is belief in a heaven on earth. The Romantic, thinking that man is infinite, “must always be talking about the infinite”. This essay is also about the metaphysical aspect of the fundamental theme’s quest for Reality as God.

Hulme’s attack on Renaissance humanism was also an attack on the Romantic concept of man as being by nature good.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.