Futurism
Quick answer: Futurism celebrated speed, machines and the shock of the new. Explore Marinetti's manifesto, Russian Futurism and what the movement offers poets now.
Futurism was the avant-garde movement launched by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's 1909 manifesto in Le Figaro, which declared that a roaring motor car was more beautiful than the classical statue of the Winged Victory. It worshipped speed, machinery, youth and violent renewal, demanded the destruction of museums, and set out to drag poetry into the industrial age by force.
The movement's poetry experiments outlived its slogans. Freed typography, compressed syntax and onomatopoeic noise-writing all trace back to Futurist pages, and its Russian branch produced Mayakovsky, one of the great poets of the twentieth century. It is also a cautionary tale: the Italian wing's later entanglement with Fascism shows how an aesthetic of force can curdle into politics of force.
Italian Futurism: Words in Freedom
Marinetti's poetic programme was 'parole in libertà', words in freedom: abolish adjectives and adverbs, scrap conventional syntax, use infinitive verbs and mathematical signs, and let type size and placement perform the noise of modern life. His 1914 book Zang Tumb Tumb renders an artillery bombardment as pure typographic sound.
The manifestos glorified war and dismissed the past wholesale, positions that led Marinetti toward Mussolini in the 1920s. Honest accounts of the movement hold both facts: real formal invention, and a politics most readers now find repellent.
Russian Futurism: A Slap in the Face
The Russian Futurists issued their own manifesto in 1912, titled A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, demanding that Pushkin be thrown from 'the steamship of modernity'. Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexei Kruchenykh invented 'zaum', a trans-rational language of invented words meant to carry meaning through sound alone.
Vladimir Mayakovsky became the movement's giant: loud, tender, self-dramatising, stepping down the page in his signature broken 'staircase' lines. Russian Futurism ran on collision with the establishment, and after the revolution its members' fates diverged sharply.
What Futurism Offers a Poet Now
Strip the ideology and useful machinery remains. Try writing sound before sense: pick a modern noise, a train, a printer, a stadium, and score it in syllables the way Marinetti scored artillery. Try a stanza with no adjectives at all, verbs doing every ounce of work. An invented taste of the manner: 'Turbine turbine iron psalm / the platform swallows its own thunder.' Speed on the page is a craft skill, whatever you think of speed as a creed.
What poets can take from this
- Write one draft with no adjectives or adverbs; let verbs and nouns carry all the energy.
- Score a modern sound in invented syllables, then decide how much to keep in the real poem.
- Use the page: type size, spacing and line breaks can perform motion, as Mayakovsky's staircase lines show.
- Compress syntax where the poem's subject is speed; grammar can enact the meaning.
- Read movements critically: you can borrow a technique without adopting its politics.
Try it yourself
Choose the fastest thing you saw this week and write a poem that tries to move at its speed: short lines, no adjectives, at least one invented word for a sound that has no name.
Questions
What did the Futurist manifesto actually say?
Marinetti's 1909 manifesto praised speed, machines, danger and youth, declared war 'the world's only hygiene', and called for museums and libraries to be demolished. It was designed to scandalise, and it worked across Europe within months.
How were Italian and Russian Futurism different?
They shared the love of speed, provocation and the new, but developed separately. The Italians pushed typography and noise under Marinetti's centralised command; the Russians pushed language itself, inventing zaum, and produced Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov.
Did Futurism influence later poetry?
Strongly. Concrete poetry, sound poetry and much visual page design descend from parole in libertà, and Vorticism in England defined itself partly by arguing with Marinetti. Mayakovsky's staircase line still shapes how poets use the page.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.