Barron is an associate professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. Beginning in 2001, he will be the editor-in-chief of The Robert Frost Review. In the following essay, he considers the impact of the early 20th-century artistic movement, Italian Futurism, on "Overture to a Dance of Locomotives."

In the history of twentieth-century art, Italian futurism was one of the first and most exciting new movements to include both poetry and painting. It began in 1909 when Italian poet and painter F. T. Marinetti published a manifesto. This dramatic fullpage article, published in the staid, conservative Paris newspaper Le Figaro, announced the birth of a new idea for art. Among that paper's respectable readership, the manifesto caused a sensation, because it challenged and contested the readers' mostly traditional notions of poetry and painting. Soon the movement became notorious. By 1910, five Italian painters had joined with Marinetti. Together they...