Marjorie Perloff's piece "The Great War and the European Avant-Garde" provides a helpful review of Italian Futurism, Pound's Vorticism, Russian Futurism, and French Futurism. It seems that Futurism as a movement began with manifestos (like Marinetti's) and spread throughout Europe rather quickly. Each form or location of Futurism seemed to be as artistically revolutionary as it was politically revolutionary. The term avant-garde, as Perloff notes, is a military term that means to be in the front flank leading the way and always carries with it a sense of being "embattled" (142). It makes sense then that Futurism as avant-garde would not only lead the way in creating a new artistic aesthetic but a sort of militaristic aesthetic that was violent, advocated for the political revolution of the working class, and expressed a certain forward motion or dynamic. When discussing Marinetti's Italian Futurist manifesto, Perloff notes, "The Manifesto...[was] a celebration of 'the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness'" (145). The Manifesto also called for "courage, audacity, and revolt" (145). These two descriptions of Marinetti's Italian Futurism could be read as applying to poetry, or political revolution. It seems that for many Futurists, Italian and Russian, art and politics were inseparable. Futurism clearly anticipated and later reflected the necessity of violence and adversarial political ideologies germane to war. Moreover, Futurism used the war as a backdrop, even a pedestal for its aesthetic and political agendas. That is, Futurists like Marinetti were keen to realize that militarism and revolution are akin to war, and by aligning his political and aesthetic ideologies with those wartime sensibilities, he was successful in gaining immediate traction for his movement.

On the other hand, it may be unfair to align all of the Futurist movements as pro-war, militaristic, and politically revolutionary simply because they are avant-garde and take place around World War I. The French Futurist, Apollinaire, embraced a less political and aggressively violent form of avant-garde Futurism in his poem "It's Raining." The avant-garde nature of this poem reflects a poetic experiment through a "visual and verbal collaboration" (157). This collaboration can result in a poem whose verbal text mirrors its visual image. Apollinaire's poem appears as five semi-parallel lines that run downward along the length of the page slanting to the right. Simply put, the semi-parallel lines create what looks like raindrops in the actual process of falling downward at an angle. This visual and verbal collaboration embraces the avant-garde idea of movement and dynamism found in Futurism and Vorticism, but it also seems to embrace some of Marinetti's futurist poetics that Perloff discusses earlier. Perloff writes, "Poetry, Marinetti argued, could get rid of most parts of speech, especially the decorative adjective along with the adverb...[p]unctuation was also to be eliminated so that poetry might be 'an uninterrupted sequence of new images'" (150). Similarly, Apollinaire's poem has minimal adjectives, adverbs, and has no punctuation. As Marinetti argued, this creates of an uninterrupted flow of words that create images verbally and also visually through their experimental arrangement. Therefore, we can see through this example of Apollinaire's poetry that avant-garde futurist poetry during World War I may share many aesthetic similarities with other Futurists' agendas (as expressed primarily in their manifestos), but it may not necessary be overtly violent, militaristic, or political.