Reactionary Modernism: From Hulme to Bowden
How did reactionaries and social conservatives find value in radical new forms of art?
In this article, I will look at some links between reactionary supporters of Modernism in literature and visual art, namely T.E. Hulme, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and Jonathan Bowden. These were social and political conservatives who saw value in art that was formally advanced, such as free verse, collage, Cubism, primitivist-influenced carving and even abstraction. These thinkers constitute a minority among both political conservatives and artistic Modernists but they represent an influential and important strand of thinking.
Poet, philosopher, translator and journalist Thomas Ernest Hulme (1883-1917) has been credited as the leading theorist of Modernism from 1908 until 1917. His poems have been called the first truly modern poem in the English language. This is no small achievement, considering Hulme wrote so few poems and published only six in his lifetime. Hulme’s few poems and a lecture of 1908 provided the spark for – or anticipated – the formation of the Imagist group in 1909. He noted that vers libre from France and Italy had provided an impetus for fashion-following poets writing in English. “Those arts like poetry, whose matter is immortal, must find a new technique each generation. Each age must have its own special form of expression, and any period that deliberately goes out of it is an age of insincerity.”