Manifesto of Futurism
1.
We
intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.
2.
Courage,
audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.
3.
Up to
now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend
to exalt aggresive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal
leap, the punch and the slap.
4.
We
affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the
beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like
serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is
more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
5.
We
want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the
Earth, along the circle of its orbit.
6.
The
poet must spend himself with ardor, splendor, and generosity, to swell the
enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
7.
Except
in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character
can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown
forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.
8.
We
stand on the last promontory of the centuries!... Why should we look back, when
what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and
Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created
eternal, omnipresent speed.
9.
We
will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the
destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and
scorn for woman.
10. We will destroy the museums, libraries,
academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or
utilitarian cowardice.
11. We will sing of great crowds excited by
work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic
tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly
fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy
railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by
the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant
gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers
that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks
like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek
flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to
cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.
