Vladimir Mayakovsky

Art must not be concentrated in dead shrines called museums. lt must be spread everywhere – on the streets, in the trams, factories, workshops, and in the workers' homes.

Love for us is no paradise of arbors —
to us love tells us, humming, that the stalled motor of the heart
has started to work again.

In parade deploying the armies of my pages,
I shall inspect the regiments in line.
Heavy as lead, my verses at attention stand,
ready for death and for immortal fame.

Hey, you!
Heaven!
Off with your hat!
I am coming! Not a sound. The universe sleeps,
its huge paw curled
upon a star-infested ear.

Love's ship has foundered on the rocks of life.
We're quits: stupid to draw up a list
of mutual sorrows, hurts and pains.

I understand the power and the alarm of words –
Not those that they applaud from theatre-boxes,
but those which make coffins break from bearers
and on their four oak legs walk right away.

If you wish,
I shall grow irreproachably tender:
not a man, but a cloud in trousers!

A rhyme's … a barrel of dynamite. A line is a fuse that's lit.
The line smoulders, the rhyme explodes –
and by a stanza a city is blown to bits.

Tramp squares with rebellious treading!
Up heads! As proud peaks be seen!
In the second flood we are spreading
Every city on earth will be clean.

No gray hairs streak my soul,
no grandfatherly fondness there!
I shake the world with the might of my voice,
and walk – handsome,
twentytwoyearold.

On the pavement
of my trampled soul
the steps of madmen
weave the prints of rude crude words.

Agitprop sticks in my teeth too,
and I'd rather compose romances for you –
more profit in it and more charm.
But I subdued myself, setting my heel
on the throat of my own song.

Art is not a mirror to hold up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it.

I want to be understood by my country,
but if I fail to be understood –
what then?,
I shall pass through my native land
to one side,
like a shower
of slanting rain.