The hysteric and savage banjos that meow like cats maddened by the odor of the storm; the sea which, swelling its back of a hippopotamus, applauds their songs with its sonorous twick-twacks and snorts—I understand the poet, I believe him. But, as I said, this is Marinetti’s early poetry. How far he has “progressed” you may judge from the following quotation from his latest Words at Liberty, as it appears in The London Times:
INDIFFERENZA
DI 2 ROTONDITA SOSPESE
SOLE + PALLONE
FRENATI
flamme giganti | colonne di fumo | spirali di scintille |
| villaggi | turchi | incendiati |
| grande T | ||
| rrrrrzzzonzzzzzzante d’ue monoplano bulgaro + neve di manifesti. | ||
This “poem” is a description of a battle during the Turco-Bulgarian war; the style is supposed to be “polychromatic, polymorphous, and polyphonic, that may not only animalize, vegetalize, electrify, and liquefy itself, but penetrate and express the essence and the atomic life of matter.” This is the dernier cri of Italian Futurism which originated in a—draff-ditch. Here is Marinetti’s own “electrified” description of that memorable event:
As usual we spent the night in our favorite café, which is attended by the most elegant women. Some one suggested that we take an automobile ride in the suburbs. We whirled over the sleepy streets. Out of town. Deep darkness.... Moment of falling. We are hurled into an abyss. Ecstasy....
Then—we are on the bottom of a ditch filled with malodorous dregs. We drown in the mud. Mud covers the face, the body, mud blinds the eyes, fills the mouth.
Finally we succeed in getting out of the filthy ditch and we go back to the city. But....
For a certain time there remained with us the taste of rottenness; we could not get rid of the rotten odor that permeated all pores of our bodies. In the moment of falling into that ditch the idea of Futurism came into my head. On the same night before dawn we wrote the entire first manifesto on Futurism.
Thus the new art was born under peculiar circumstances—“under the sign of scandal”—and scandal became the tactics of Italian Futurists who have professed their “delight in being hissed” and their contempt for applause.