When was the futurist manifesto published

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. We stand on the last promontory of the centuries! Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.

We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice. 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.

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Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously. But the Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti went one better: he invented futurism, launched like a political movement through a manifesto on the front page of Le Figaro on 20 February But his words willed the movement into being. Art became life. Other manifestos would follow, covering everything from architecture, cinema and menswear to music hall, syntax and lust.

Futurism was the idea that modernity and its rapid scientific advances changed what it meant to be human.

For Marinetti, this new human sensibility required the creative destruction of all institutions. But it would be wrong to view this book-burning—an image inevitably associated for us with all too real subsequent occurences under totalitarian regimes—in sinister terms.

A recent nation-state, far from unified within its own borders and unsure of its status among other European powers, Italy, in their view, needed to embrace modernity wholeheartedly; instead of looking at the past, with the inevitable result of an inferiority complex, it ought to confront the future, boldly assert its own creative voice. And books, in the development of which Renaissance Florentine, Milanese, and Ventian printers had played such a prominent part, were a thing of the past.

This revolution, as in many other -isms of the twentieth-century, began as a revolution of the word, an opening up of language to all kinds of hitherto unexplored possibilities.