At what point in history does the poet begin to understand his activity as a ‘craft’? The self-understanding of poetic activity as craft (as it appears, almost parodically, in Seamus Heaney) is predicated on the emergence of modern technology, or ‘the technological’ in general. As craft itself disappears it is then seen in its specificity, and swims into view as, finally, an object of nostalgia, to be appropriated metaphorically by poets and thinkers. Conversely, the giddy excitement of the Futurists is predicated on a still measurable distance between modern technology, with its speed and automation, and older, slower forms of life. ‘Craft’ is needed by the Futurists as that from which they escape; the one can only be experienced when silhouetted against the other, and the virility of the New is parasitic, by way of contrast, on the Old.. Thus, then the old dies the New does not triumph – it, too disappears. .