Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes

Poetry of the Revolution tells the story of political and artistic upheavals through the manifestos of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ranging from the Communist Manifesto to the manifestos of the 1960s and beyond, it highlights the varied alliances and rivalries between socialism and repeated waves of avant-garde art. Martin Puchner argues that the manifesto—what Marx called the "poetry" of the revolution—was the genre through which modern culture articulated its revolutionary ambi...