엘리엇의 흄

Eliot’s Hulme

This paper explores the relationship between T. E. Hulme (1883-1917) and T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), focussing on their intellectual affinities and the ways in which Eliot exploited them in his campaign for ‘Classicism.’ Eliot consistently quoted or made references to Hulme’s texts, thus generating one or another textual network, which was, in the first place, made possible through the remarkable similarities between their intellectual trajectories: they both struggled against the mechanistic world-view at the turn of the century and embraced Henri Bergson’s life philosophy enthusiastically; however, their enthusiasm did not last long mainly because the French philosopher’s Romantic outlook was ultimately incompatible with their Classicist view. In a nutshell, Classicism stresses man’s extremely fixed nature and relies on external authorities as is fully indicated in Hulme’s and Eliot’s unreserved endorsement of royalism and Anglo-Catholicism. Eliot’s radical distrust of self or “individual talent” led him to search for something outside himself and the figure of allusion represents a literary manifestation of such a philosophical temper. Eliot repeatedly expressed his admiration for Hulme, but as I have tried to show in this paper, Old Possum also continued to invoke Hulme the poet-philosopher to promote and bolster his own cultural and literary position in deliberately strategic ways.