Carcanet has just published a _Selected Writings_ of T. E. Hulme, edited by
Patrick McGuinness. The price is L12.95, the ISBN mentioned in the TLS
review is apparently wrong, because it has only 9 digits, and Amazon.com
doesn't seem to be selling it yet in the United States. And here's part of
what Scott Ashley says about it in the January 29 TLS, p. 38.
 
"[T]here is much more at stake in a reading of Hulme than simply bringing
some fine poetry from the shadows back to the light. For alongside the
Imagist Hulme, who is not unknown to those interested in early Modernist
writing, there is another Hulme, less palatable to twentieth-century taste.
The insistence in his later work on the necessity of a belief in Original
Sin, his contempt for the state of affairs we loosely call democracy, his
vigorous anti-Humanism, seem rebarbative and even dangerous today. Yet on
reading through 'Cinders' of 1906-07 to 'A Notebook' of 1915-16, we see
something more complex and problematic than a mere reactionary. He found
democracy repugnant, yet believed it a self-evidently 'true doctrine that
all men are equal.' He may have washed up in the exclusivist circles of
Action Francaise, but his writing is free of any trace of the anti-Semitism
that so blighted the career of Pound. His espousal of extreme and absolute
principles must be offset against his acute sense, derived from Henri
Bergson, of fundamental chaos waiting to reveal itself. What remains of
value in his work is not to be appreciated by reading him in the light of
what our century became."
 
Jonathan Morse
Department of English,
University of Hawaii at Manoa