Text extract: F. T. Marinetti, Initial Manifesto of Futurism, 1909.

On 20 February 1909 the Italian poet F. T. Marinetti announced the beginning of Futurism in this manifesto published on the front page of the Paris newspaper Le Figaro. Marinetti calls on artists and writers to forgo conventional methods and embrace the modern, dynamic world, with new means of expression.

Initial Manifesto of Futurism (Feb 20, 1909)

1. We shall sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and boldness.
2. The essential elements of our poetry shall be courage, daring and rebellion.
3. Literature has hitherto glorified thoughtful immobility, ecstacy and sleep; we shall extol aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, the double quick step, the somersault, the box on the ear, the fisticuff.
4. We declare that the world's splendour has been enriched by a new beauty; the beauty of speed. A racing motor-car, its frame adorned with great pipes, like snakes with explosive breath... a roaring motor-car, which looks as though running on scrapnel, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
5. We shall sing of the man at the steering wheel, whose ideal stem transfixes the Earth, rushing over the circuit of her orbit.
6. The poet must give himself with frenzy, with splendour and with lavishness, in order to increase the enthusiastic fervour of the primordial elements.
7. There is no more beauty except in strife. No masterpiece without aggressiveness. Poetry must be a violent onslaught upon the unknown forces, to command them to bow before man.
8. We stand upon the extreme promontory of the centuries!...Why should we look behing us, when we have to break in the mysterious portals of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. Already we live in the absolute, since we have already created speed, eternal and ever-present.
9. We wish to glorify War - the only health giver of the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive arm of the Anarchist, the beautiful Ideas that kill, the contempt for woman.
10. We wish to destroy the museums, the libraries, to fight against moralism, feminism and all opportunistic and utilitarian meannesses.
11. We shall sing of the great crowds in the excitement of labour, pleasure and rebellion; of the multi-coloured and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capital cities; of the nocturnal vibration of arsenals and workshops beneath their violent electric moons; of the greedy stations swallowing smoking snakes; of factories suspended from the clouds by their strings of smoke; of bridges leaping like gymnasts over the diabolical cutlery of sunbathed rivers; of adventurous liners scenting the horizon; of broad-chested locomotives prancing on the rails, like huge steel horses bridled with long tubes; and of the gliding flight of aeroplanes, the sound of whose screw is like the flapping of flags and the applause of an enthusiastic crowd.

Excerpt taken from F. T. Marinetti, Intital Manifesto of Futurism, p. 124 from Futurism (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1961) edited by Joshua C. Taylor.
© courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.