"The point de repere usually and conveniently taken as the starting-point of modern poetry," T.S. Eliot remarked in a 1953 lecture, "is the group denominated `imagists' in London about 1910." The ringleader of this group, its philosopher and one of its best poets, was T.E. Hulme. Through his own work and even more through the work of major poets such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound who learned from him, Hulme contributed immeasurably to poetry in the twentieth century. But he was more than one of the founding fathers of modern poetry; in all the arts, he was a prophet of and an advocate for modernism. Nothing was more important in the development of modern art than the consciousness, shared by major artists in all media in the decade before World War I, that a major dispensation in the history of art, a dispensation reaching back hundreds...