Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the Futurist Manifesto on the front page of Le Figaro on 20 February 1909, declaring speed, the automobile, and the machine to be the supreme aesthetic values and rejecting the entire literary past.

The Futurist Manifesto is the most direct literary document ever produced about speed as an aesthetic ideal; it launched Futurism, influenced Vorticism, Dada, and constructivist poetry, and permanently changed what poetry could celebrate — from pastoral to the roar of engines.