Words Like Fire

<p>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.'</p><p>James Leveque is a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Advanced Study of the Humanities University of Edinburgh.</p>