Great Regulars: The author of this week's poem is remembered

today chiefly for the anthology-favourite, "Autumn". T.E. Hulme published only six short poems in his lifetime. Without Ezra Pound's faintly ambiguous championship, he might not be known as a poet at all. Though omitting his work from the official Imagist anthologies, Pound added Hulme's five earlier poems to his own 1912 collection, Ripostes, "for good fellowship: for good custom, a custom out of Tuscany and Provence . . . and for good memory . . .", as he put it in the preface.

No original manuscript of "Trenches: St Eloi" remains. According to some accounts, Hulme recited it from memory to his fellow Imagists at the Poets' Club while home on leave from the front (he served with the Royal Marine Artillery).

from Carol Rumens: The Guardian: Poem of the week: Poem of the week: Trenches: St. Eloi by T.E. Hulme

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