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 experiences. 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), James Leveque frames the early avant-garde as an attempt to rediscover the necessity of prophecy and apocalyptic thought. Biblical literature furnished a sense of legitimacy and distinction to these avant-garde writers by charging many of their works with themes of spiritual direction in a new rationalized and secularized century, allowing them to present themselves as preachers of the End Times or visionaries of a new heaven and a new earth.

James Leveque has taught literature at the University of Edinburgh, University of Dundee, and Edinburgh Napier University, and currently teaches at the City Literary Institute in London.