"The Beautiful Future": Harold Monro, F. T. Marinetti, and Early Modernist Poetry in England

In the September 1913 issue of the London-based journal Poetry and Drama, Harold Monro made the astonishing declaration that not only would the issue be devoted to the work of the Italian futurists, but also that the members of the periodical "claim ourselves, also, to be futurists." The announcement was followed by Monro's assertion that "long ago, before we had heard of the Italian Movement, we conceived the desire to 'serve, worship, and obey the beautiful Future,'" and a short, enumerated list of aims:

The first principles of our Futurism are:

I. To forget God, Heaven, Hell, Personal Immortality, and to remember, always, the earth.

II. To lift the eyes from a sentimental contemplation of the past, and, though dwelling in the present, nevertheless, always, to live, in the future of the earth.¹

Monro, a British writer who was born and spent the early part of his life in Belgium, is a neglected figure in modernist criticism. For his biographer, Dominic Hibberd, "no-one did more for the development of twentieth-century poetry, yet his reward has been near-oblivion."² Monro was a poet whose writings include Judas (1907), Before Dawn (1911), and Strange Meetings (1917), but it was in his roles as an anthologist, as editor of the periodicals the Poetry Review (1912–13), Poetry and Drama (1913–14), and the Chapbook (1919–25), and as proprietor of the Poetry Bookshop, that he emerges at the center of a network of modernist writers and cultural figures operating in London.³ The Poetry Bookshop, which Monro founded in 1913 at 35 Devonshire Street (now Boswell Street) in Bloomsbury, was not only a place for selling books, but also an important publishing house for contemporary poets that issued Ezra Pound's seminal anthology Des Imagistes (1914), Richard Aldington's Images (1910–1915) (1915), and the Georgian Poetry anthologies (1912–22). It was also a cultural hub, where a number of significant modernist figures gathered to attend poetry readings and exchange ideas.

Monro first met the futurist impresario F. T. Marinetti in Milan in August 1913, after which they were in regular correspondence.⁴ During this time, Monro arranged for a comprehensive selection of futurist writing to be published in a special futurist issue of Poetry and Drama. Although some futurist manifestos had already been published in England, the September 1913 issue of Poetry and Drama was the first time that English readers had translated access to futurist poetry: in this sense, Monro's publication of futurist poems constitutes the first time that futurist literature had been published in a sincere way in England. Monro also invited Marinetti to give a reading at the Poetry Bookshop on November 18, 1913, and later helped Marinetti by arranging for him to give a lecture in Cambridge on "La Poésie Futuriste et les Mots en Liberté" (Futurist Poetry and Words in Freedom), shortly after his lecture at the Doré Gallery on May 28, 1914.⁵

Monro's involvement with the futurists did not generate the same level of publicity as that of the vorticists' notorious rivalry with the Italian group, and has therefore garnered less critical attention: in fact, in most accounts of futurism in England, Monro's involvement is limited to a short paragraph.⁶ However, Monro's collaboration with Marinetti shows him to have been an important translator and editor of futurism in England and their relationship to have been a major instance of international collaboration early in the modernist period. This association was fueled by the sense of a shared cultural project, in which poetry was to be recalibrated for the modern era. Yet if Monro and the Poetry and Drama set's foray into futurism and their publication of futurist poems has occasionally been commented on, the actual texts chosen for English translation and publication have not.⁷ When examined more closely, this publication—the issue of Poetry and Drama in which futurist poetry appeared—illustrates not, as might be expected, futurism's disruptive break with literary tradition, but rather modes of continuity between decadent and...