T.E. Hulme is known to students of modernism as a progenitor of Eliot’s modernist theory of impersonality, according to which poetry (and criticism) should be an escape from emotions, feelings, and personal history. Further, Hulme’s distinction between romanticism and classicism forms the basis of the New Critical doctrine of Intentional Fallacy, which (to put it very crudely) warns that authorial design and intention, and context are neither available nor desirable for judging a literary work. How do we write biographically about the work of an author who valorised impersonality and objectivity – indeed, who opposed autobiography as a purely humanist enterprise? Beginning from this problematic, this paper will attempt an ‘affective’ reading of ‘Trenches: St. Eloi’, a poem that Hulme is understood to have recited to Pound in 1915 whilst convalescing from a bullet wound in London (but whose authorship remains undecided). For whilst Hulme rallies against ‘subjective’ analysis in favour of ‘impersonal’, ‘objective’ critique, read through through Max Scheler’s phenomenology, Henri Bergson’s intuition, and Blaise Pascal’s ‘logique du coeur’, his call for objectivity and impersonality is seen to allow, if not for personal, for ‘affective’ interpretations of literature.