- We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy
and fearlessness.
- Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of
our poetry.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- The poet must spend himself with ardor, splendor, and
generosity, to swell the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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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There are a lot of things we believe that we’ll probably
do.We’ll spend our time thinking about things our parents don’t want us to do
AND we’ll write poems about it. We’ll tell others to read books that feature the
little things that we think are exciting. Cars are cool. We’ll try to get others to
see why they’re so fascinated by them; we may be artists, but we think fast cars are
the new art. We think people who drive are just as cool as the cars, driving around and
around. Poets need to get their acts together, too, to capture the thrill of fast cars in
their poems. Then poetry would be worth reading. If you can’t appeal to young people
and their unique problems, why bother? Artists and poets of the past have never captured
our struggles before. It’s like we’re jumping into a new sense of time. Even
concepts of what space and time were aren’t relevant to us anymore.
We need to live in the moment, not the past.
People talk about how bad violence is, but we think that war really cleans out some of the
riff-raff. Only the strong survive, right? And we all know that weak people, girls, and
the unpatriotic don’t deserve to live. Institutions that have produced the weaklings
should be abolished too, along with all the liberal, whiny ideas that they feed on. Have
you ever been in a group of people like that? If you try, you can almost feel our new
ideas coming out of smokestacks, bridges, reflections of sunlight, trains, and planes that
remind us of the excitement of the groundswell of a concert crowd. It would be cool if
everyone got that, but then again, that would get us in the same space we’re in, man.
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