Metropolitan Futurism :: urban speed, lines, lights and speed

MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM - Le Figaro - 20/02/1909

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.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti