Words Like Fire

The avant-garde in the early-twentieth century planted its flag on the ruins of the day's pieties, with religion a particularly urgent target. Movements such as Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism often represented religion in blasphemous, prurient, or sacrilegious ways: but the invocation of spirituality and scripture were also indispensable to their transcendent, revelatory experience. Examining the contemporaneous, and cross-national, careers in poetry and artistic propaganda of Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), F. T. Marinetti (1876-1944), and Ezra Pound (1885-1972), Leveque frames the early avant-garde as an attempt to rediscover the necessity of prophecy and apocalyptic thought. By engaging common themes of spiritual orientation, religion furnished a sense of legitimacy or distinction for writers presenting themselves as preachers of the End Times, or visionaries of 'new heavens and a new earth.'

James Leveque is a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Advanced Study of the Humanities, University of Edinburgh.