Futurism (poetry movement)

Works Discussed in This Essay

• "Cineland" by Paolo Buzzi
• "The Effectual Marriage, or The Insipid Narrative of Gina and Miovanni" by Mina Loy
• "Let the Moon Be Damned" by Enrico Cavacchioli
• "What Fun" by Farfa
• Zang Tumb Tumb by F. T. Marinetti

In the early 1900s, as a new generation of writers began entering the scene, Italian poetry underwent a dramatic transformation. This resulted in the emergence of two waves of canon-altering poetic movements. The first was a group of young poets known as the poeti crepuscolari (twilight poets), so called because they felt that their time was a twilit one and that the best years of Italian artistic expression had already passed. Crepuscolari poems were known for their straightforward, unadorned style and melancholy tone. Although a number of the poeti crepuscolari, such as Sergio Corazzini and Guido Gozzano, earned national acclaim, the movement proved to be a short-lived one. By the time crepuscolarismo began to wane, a new avant-garde artistic philosophy known as futurismo, or futurism, had emerged. Like crepuscolarismo, futurism was also a reaction to the past. Unlike crepuscolarismo, futurism did not mourn for yesteryears, but rather demanded that Italy embrace a new culture of modernity.

Futurism's introduction to the national, and later international, public was unprecedentedly dramatic. In February 1909, a writer by the name Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published a radical literary doctrine entitled "Fondazione e manifesto del futurismo" ("Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism," better known as just the "Manifesto of Futurism") in a number of both Italian and foreign newspapers, most notably the Parisian daily Le Figaro. Against the backdrop of Italy's culture of passatismo—a derogatory term coined by the futurists, meaning "passé-ism" or, more broadly, traditionalism—the publication of Marinetti's manifesto proved to be a seismic event. Passatismo was a mindset marked by a stubborn refusal to let go of traditional ideas, values, and artistic behaviors. The futurist manifesto called on artists to break away from passatismo in a violent fashion. Marinetti argued Italy's obsession with its artistic past made it impossible to produce anything new and exciting. "Today we are founding 'Futurism,' because we wish to free our country from the stinking canker of its professors, archaeologists, tour guides, and antiquarians," he wrote. "For far too long Italy has been a marketplace for junk dealers. We want our country free from the endless number of museums that everywhere cover her like countless graveyards" (qtd. in Danchev).

Marinetti organized the futurist manifesto around eleven tenets, which collectively rejected the past and celebrated ideas representative of the future, including youth, speed, machinery, and industry. Marinetti, who saw himself as a political philosopher and knew Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's Manifest der kommunistischen Partei (1848; Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1850) by heart, believed that his artistic movement would flourish best under a fascist regime. Consequently, the futurist manifesto also commended war, describing it as "the sole cleanser of the world" (qtd. in Danchev). It was through war, Marinetti believed, that Italy could tear down the vestiges of the past and build an entirely new culture. While Marinetti belonged to some literary circles during this time, the beliefs espoused in the manifesto were initially only his own. It proved to be a rallying cry, however. Days after its appearance in Le Figaro, the manifesto was printed and circulated as leaflet throughout a number of European cities.

The impact of the futurist manifesto on early twentieth-century European culture was both quick and broad in its reach. Soon after its publication, Marinetti began connecting with a number of young writers and artists. Futurism proved to be an all-encompassing artistic philosophy that would lead to the rise of everything from futurist architecture to futurist music to futurist films. In 1910, Marinetti discovered four young artists whose work would go on to become the iconic imagery most associated with the movement. Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, and Gino Severini were all painters who were predominantly involved in shaping the futurist aesthetic. Like futurist literature, their art aimed to capture the effects of industrialization and included imagery of cityscapes, automobiles, and bicycles. Combining elements of cubism with Divisionism, an artistic style in which light and colors are broken down into series of dots and lines, the paintings found revolutionary new ways to depict the power of speed and movement.

Futurist literature first flourished in the cities of Milan and Florence. Marinetti remained the most prominent figure in the scene, producing dozens of poems, novels, and plays. Yet none of his early works were considered a true artistic success. While some of his later works, such as his lengthy sound poem Zang Tumb Tumb (1914), would become emblematic of the movement, ultimately, none of Marinetti's writings would be as critically acclaimed and influential as the futurist manifesto. What Marinetti lacked as an author, however, he made up for in his ability to attract and energize new talent.

During the height of the movement, from 1909 to 1918, a new wave of futurist poets emerged on the scene. Many of these figures fit a distinct pattern: they were all well-educated men from wealthy families. After signing the futurist manifesto, they embraced the movement's industrialized values and experimental style wholeheartedly throughout the mid-1910s. Towards the end of the decade, however, most would break away to either seek their own literary paths or return to a more classic style. This was the case for Aldo Giurlani (pen name Aldo Palazzeschi), a young Italian poet born to a bourgeois Florentine family who produced dozens of futurist poems before publicly disavowing the movement in 1914. Similarly, the distinguished journalist Enrico Cavacchioli joined the futurist movement immediately upon its inception in 1909 but began to distance himself from it in 1914. Two of the few writers who, alongside Marinetti, continued producing futurist works after World War I were Vittorio Osvaldo Tommasini, who used the pseudonym Farfa, and Paolo Buzzi, a Milanese-born poet who published a number of futurist poetry collections, plays, and films.

Italian futurism persisted with Marinetti at the helm throughout the 1920s and 1930s. By this time, however, many artists and writers had already left the movement as a result of its increasingly radical politics. In the wake of World War I, Marinetti became convinced that the key to modernizing rural southern Italy was a nationalist, violent revolution. In 1918, he launched the Partito Politico Futurista (Futurist Political Party), which was absorbed the following year by Benito Mussolini's Fasci Italiani di Combattimento (Italian Combat Leagues), the forerunner of the Partito Nazionale Fascista (National Fascist Party). Although this caused a number of people to abandon the ideology altogether, the movement continued to grow abroad. International communities of futurist writers and artists emerged in England, Portugal, Brazil, Slovenia, Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine. One of the most prolific futurist communities lived and worked in Russia. Russian futurism began in 1912 when the Moscow-based literary group Hylaea published their own manifesto, "Poshchechina obshchestvennomu vkusu" ("A Slap in the Face of Public Taste"). The most prominent figures of this movement included the poets Vasily Kamensky, Aleksei Kruchenykh, and Vladimir Mayakovsky. Like their Italian counterparts, these Russian futurist poets aimed to celebrate the speed, machinery, and industry of modern life.

Many of the stylistic elements and themes of futurist poetry, novels, and plays were first introduced to the public in Marinetti's "Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista" ("Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature"). An ancillary piece published in 1912, the "Technical Manifesto," comprises eleven stylistic pillars, which include such demands as the abolishment of all adjectives, adverbs, and punctuation. The purpose of futurist writing, Marinetti argued, was to celebrate the modern world and bring humankind and machines together. To truly accomplish this, poets would have to liberate words from thousands of years of grammatical rules.

The primary goal of futurist poets was to produce work that represented a sharp break away from classic literature. As a result, many of the movement's poems were highly experimental in their style and structure. This tendency is primarily evident in the way that many futurist poems look on the page. Futurists used different typography, font sizes, and layouts with the intention of grabbing their readers' attention. Some futurist poems were calligrams, in which the poets arranged the words of the poem so that they formed images that were visual representations of the work's subject matter. Others were not true calligrams but still broke ground with their innovative use of space between words. In her poem "The Effectual Marriage, or The Insipid Narrative of Gina and Miovanni," Mina Loy, an English modernist writer who briefly participated in the Italian futurism movement, uses well-placed spaces instead of punctuation to signal pauses in thought. In this way, she is adhering to Marinetti's rejection of punctuation as stated in the "Technical Manifesto." More than that, however, Loy uses the spaces to convey the poem's underlying meaning. Written about her relationship with futurist writer Giovanni Papini, the poem uses the spaces to illustrate the fact that "Gina" and "Miovanni" are struggling to connect. Through these spaces, Loy conveys multiple planes of existence and feelings of isolation.

Another way that futurist poets engaged in experimentalism was by replacing traditional poetic themes, ideas, and imagery with modern ones. This is evident in Enrico Cavacchioli's 1914 poem "Sia maledetta la luna" ("Let the Moon Be Damned"). Like many of his futurist colleagues, Cavacchioli felt that images of the moon and moonlight were representative of traditional Romanticism and therefore demonstrated nostalgia for the past. "Let the Moon Be Damned" argues that it is time for people to embrace the future by welcoming industrialization into both their minds and their bodies. This sentiment is especially evident in the last three stanzas of "Let the Moon Be Damned":

and powder your lovely face with chimney soot;

then shoot a million volts into your system

You must make of life a computed dream

triggered by levers, the contact of wires.

And when your heart has become an electrostat,

and your tenacious hands are mean as iron,

and you can puff your breast up like a sea,

then may you vaunt your definitive victory.

If, now, the cold machine surpasses man,

in its perfection brutal and precise,

that day will come we rule the brute machine,

lords of the finite and the infinite,

and the moon be damned! (17–29)

In these stanzas, Cavacchioli presents soot, electricity, and wires from a Romantic point of view. By doing so, he is celebrating modern technology in the same way that classic poets such as Homer celebrated heroism and adventure.

This futurist tendency to replace traditional natural and Romantic images with industrialized ones is also evident in Paolo Buzzi's 1933 poem "Cinelandia" ("Cineland"). In the poem, Buzzi describes the glow of the movie screen in the same romantic way that other poets might describe moonlight. The poem begins:

The film

shudders,

seeps into Sunday's

lost soul!

May the silent goddess illuminate me

with her transoceanic beauty:

and may the 'I love you' heartbeat an engraving

on the screen like a crack on the wall . . . (1–8)

"Cineland" is a free-verse poem that completely lacks the rhyme scheme and meter of traditional poetry, even in the original Italian. In this way, it reflects the futurist tendency to prioritize intuition over intellectualism. In other words, futurists such as Buzzi would resist the rules of traditional poetry and instead write intuitively, allowing their poems to adopt any structure or style that "felt" right. Ultimately, "Cineland" is intended to fluidly and accurately capture the experience of attending the movie theater, and all of the glorious modern technology on offer there, on a Sunday afternoon. Buzzi is able to accomplish this because there are no literary rules to restrict the expression of his emotions. "Cineland" also demonstrates how many futurists viewed well-formed sentences as unnecessary.

The futurist proclivity for casual, loose sentence structures can also be seen in the short Farfa poem "Grande delizia" ("What Fun"). The poem lacks punctuation and capitalization, making it difficult to discern where sentences begin and where they end. It also reflects the futurist propensity for similes and analogies. Among the tenets of Marinetti's "Technical Manifesto" is his claim that "the life of matter can be embraced only by an orchestral style . . . by means of the most extensive analogies." An ordinary writer, he notes, might compare "a fox terrier to a tiny thoroughbred. A more advanced writer might compare that same trembling terrier to a telegraph. I, instead, compare it to gurgling water" (Rainey et al. 120). Consequently, futurist poets often used stark, contrasting analogies and similes, often between natural entities and man-made ones. Such tools were intended to grab readers' attention and wake them up to the state of the world around them. In "What Fun," Farfa compares a train entering a mountain to a licorice stick being eaten. In addition to being highly visual, this simile is ultimately intended to demonstrate how watching a train can be as joyful as eating a piece of candy.

The use of onomatopoeias was common in futurist poetry. This was the result of both the futurist belief that any collection of letters could represent a sound and the fact that sound itself was a fundamental part of modern, industrialized life. As seen with Marinetti's iconic Zang Tumb Tumb (sometimes spelled Zang Tumb Tuuum), begun in 1912 and published in book form in 1914, many of the movement's "sound poems" were intended to capture and celebrate the advancements of twentieth-century machinery. The title Zang Tumb Tumb is an onomatopoeia meant to represent the sound of bombs being dropped during the 1912–13 Battle of Adrianople, part of the First Balkan War, which Marinetti witnessed while working as a journalist. In many ways, Zang Tumb Tumb is the quintessential futurist poem. It uses onomatopoeias, an unruly calligram format, and experimental typography to successfully express the chaotic feeling of battle. Furthermore, it succeeds in answering the futurist manifesto's call to glorify war and technological advancements. As Marinetti famously wrote in that manifesto, "We believe that this wonderful world has been further enriched by a new beauty, the beauty of speed. . . . A roaring motor car, which seems to race on like machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace" (qtd. in Danchev). In Zang Tumb Tumb, Marinetti succeeds in depicting the lightning-fast, deadly weaponry of bombs as something beautiful and exciting.

Many experts consider futurism to have ended with Marinetti's death on December 2, 1944. The impact of the futurist movement on modern culture is significant. Futurism directly influenced a number of avant-garde art movements, including Art Deco, surrealism, and Dadaism. Furthermore, its obsession with youth, speed, power, and technology continued to be an important part of Western culture long after Marinetti's death. This obsession is evident in contemporary design, art, and filmmaking. The dystopian Los Angeles depicted in the 1982 film Blade Runner, for example, was based on designs by the futurist architect Antonio Sant'Elia. Similarly, the influence of futurist literature continued to persist throughout the twentieth century. Although no literary movement since then has placed such a concentrated focus on technology, machinery, and industry, futurism's stylistic experimentalism has become a hallmark of contemporary poetry.

Bibliography

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Farfa. "What Fun." Translated by Fred Chappell. C: Poems, by Chappell, Louisiana State UP, 1993, p. 36.

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