The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism
F.T. Marinetti
We had stayed up all night, my friends and I, under hanging mosque lamps with domes of filigreed
brass, domes starred like our spirits, shining like them with the prisoned radiance of electric
hearts. For hours we had trampled our atavistic ennui into rich oriental rugs, arguing up to the
last confines of logic and blackening many reams of paper with our frenzied scribbling.
An immense pride was buoying us up, because we felt ourselves alone at that hour, alone, awake,
and on our feet, like proud beacons or forward sentries against an army of hostile stars glaring
down at us from their celestial encampments. Alone with stokers feeding the hellish fires of
great ships, alone with the black spectres who grope in the red-hot bellies of locomotives
launched on their crazy courses, alone with drunkards reeling like wounded birds along the city
walls.
Suddenly we jumped, hearing the mighty noise of the huge double-decker trams that rumbled by
outside, ablaze with colored lights, like villages on holiday suddenly struck and uprooted by
the flooding Po and dragged over falls and through gourges to the sea.
Then the silence deepened. But, as we listened to the old canal muttering its feeble prayers and
the creaking bones of sickly palaces above their damp green beards, under the windows we
suddenly heard the famished roar of automobiles.
“Let’s go!” I said. “Friends, away! Let’s go! Mythology and the
Mystic Ideal are defeated at last. We’re about to see the Centaur’s birth and,
soon after, the first flight of Angels!... We must shake at the gates of life, test the bolts
and hinges. Let’s go! Look there, on the earth, the very first dawn! There’s nothing
to match the splendor of the sun’s red sword, slashing
for the first time through our millennial gloom!”
We went up to the three snorting beasts, to lay amorous hands on their torrid breasts. I
stretched out on my car like a corpse on its bier, but revived at once under the steering wheel,
a guillotine blade that threatened my stomach.
The raging broom of madness swept us out of ourselves and drove us through streets as rough and
deep as the beds of torrents. Here and there, sick lamplight through window glass taught us to
distrust the deceitful mathematics of our perishing eyes.
I cried, “The scent, the scent alone is enough for our beasts.”
And like young lions we ran after Death, its dark pelt blotched with pale crosses as it escaped
down the vast violet living and throbbing sky.
But we had no ideal Mistress raising her divine form to the clouds, nor any cruel Queen to whom
to offer our bodies, twisted like Byzantine rings! There was nothing to make us wish for death,
unless the wish to be free at last from the weight of our courage!
And on we raced, hurling watchdogs against doorsteps, curling them under our burning tires like
collars under a flatiron. Death, domesticated, met me at every turn, gracefully holding out a
paw, or once in a while hunkering down, making velvety caressing eyes at me from every puddle.
“Let’s break out of the horrible shell of wisdom and throw ourselves like
pride-ripened fruit into the wide, contorted mouth of the wind! Let’s give
ourselves utterly to the Unknown, not in desperation but only to replenish the deep wells of the
Absurd!”
The words were scarcely out of my mouth when I spun my car around with the frenzy of a dog
trying to bite its tail, and there, suddenly, were two cyclists coming towards me, shaking their
fists, wobbling like two equally convincing but nevertheless contradictory arguments. Their
stupid dilemma was blocking my way—Damn! Ouch!... I stopped short and to my disgust rolled
over into a ditch with my wheels in the air...
O maternal ditch, almost full of muddy water! Fair factory drain! I gulped down your nourishing
sludge; and I remembered the blessed black beast of my Sudanese nurse... When I came
up—torn, filthy, and stinking—from under the capsized car, I felt the white-hot iron
of joy deliciously pass through my heart!
A crowd of fishermen with handlines and gouty naturalists were already swarming around the
prodigy. With patient, loving care those people rigged a tall derrick and iron grapnels to fish
out my car, like a big beached shark. Up it came from the ditch, slowly, leaving in the bottom,
like scales, its heavy framework of good sense and its soft upholstery of comfort.
They thought it was dead, my beautiful shark, but a caress from me was enough to revive it; and
there it was, alive again, running on its powerful fins!
And so, faces smeared with good factory muck—plastered with metallic waste, with senseless
sweat, with celestial soot—we, bruised, our arms in slings, but unafraid, declared our high
intentions to all the
living
of the earth:
Manifesto of Futurism
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We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.
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Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The poet must spend himself with ardor, splendor, and generosity, to swell the
enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism,
feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.
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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.
It is from Italy that we launch through the world this violently upsetting incendiary manifesto
of ours. With it, today, we establish
Futurism,
because we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists,
ciceroni
and antiquarians. For too long has Italy been a dealer in second-hand clothes. We mean to free
her from the numberless museums that cover her like so many graveyards.
Museums: cemeteries!... Identical, surely, in the sinister promiscuity of so many bodies unknown
to one another. Museums: public dormitories where one lies forever beside hated or unknown
beings. Museums: absurd abattoirs of painters and sculptors ferociously slaughtering each other
with color-blows and line-blows, the length of the fought-over walls!
That one should make an annual pilgrimage, just as one goes to the graveyard on All Souls’
Day—that I grant. That once a year one should leave a floral tribute beneath the
Gioconda,
I grant you that... But I don’t admit that our sorrows, our fragile courage, our morbid
restlessness should be given a daily conducted tour through the museums. Why poison ourselves?
Why rot?
And what is there to see in an old picture except the laborious contortions of an artist
throwing himself against the barriers that thwart his desire to express his dream completely?...
Admiring an old picture is the same as pouring our sensibility into a funerary urn instead of
hurtling it far off, in violent spasms of action and creation.
Do you, then, wish to waste all your best powers in this eternal and futile worship of the past,
from which you emerge fatally exhausted, shrunken, beaten down?
In truth I tell you that daily visits to museums, libraries, and academies (cemeteries of empty
exertion, Calvaries of crucified dreams, registries of aborted beginnings!) are, for artists, as
damaging as the prolonged supervision by parents of certain young people drunk with their talent
and their ambitious wills. When the future is barred to them, the admirable past may be a solace
for the ills of the moribund, the sickly, the prisoner... But we want no part of it, the past,
we the young and strong
Futurists!
So let them come, the gay incendiaries with charred fingers! Here they are! Here they are!...
Come on! set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to flood the museums!...
Oh, the joy of seeing the glorious old canvases bobbing adrift on those waters, discolored and
shredded!... Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities,
pitilessly!
The oldest of us is thirty: so we have at least a decade for finishing our work. When we are
forty, other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the wastebasket like useless
manuscripts—we want it to happen!
They will come against us, our successors, will come from far away, from every quarter, dancing
to the winged cadence of their first songs, flexing the hooked claws of predators, sniffing
doglike at the academy doors the strong odor of our decaying minds, which will have already been
promised to the literary catacombs.
But we won’t be there... At last they’ll find us—one winter’s
night—in open country, beneath a sad roof drummed by a monotonous rain. They’ll
see us crouched beside our trembling aeroplanes in the act of warming our hands at the poor
little blaze that our books of today will give out when they take fire from the flight of our
images.
They’ll storm around us, panting with scorn and anguish, and all of them, exasperated by
our proud daring, will hurtle to kill us, driven by a hatred the more implacable the more their
hearts will be drunk with love and admiration for us.
Injustice, strong and sane, will break out radiantly in their eyes.
Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice.
The oldest of us is thirty: even so we have already scattered treasures, a thousand treasures of
force, love, courage, astuteness, and raw will-power; have thrown them impatiently away, with
fury, carelessly, unhesitatingly, breathless, and unresting... Look at us! We are still untired!
Our hearts know no weariness because they are fed with fire, hatred, and speed!... Does that
amaze you? It should, because you can never remember having lived! Erect on the summit of the
world, once again we hurl our defiance at the stars!
You have objections?—Enough! Enough! We know them... We’ve understood!... Our fine
deceitful intelligence tells us that we are the revival and extension of our
ancestors—Perhaps!... If only it were so!—But who cares? We don’t want to
understand!... Woe to anyone who says those infamous words to us again!
Lift up your heads!
Erect on the summit of the world, once again we hurl defiance to the stars!
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