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.
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.