Words Like Fire: Prophecy and Apocalypse in Apollinaire, Marinetti and Pound

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 Apo...