Gregory, your comment about Auden’s technological imagery not really being a “celebration of the machine” made me wonder what in English or American poetry would have been comparable to Italian Futurists--aside from their Fascist politics, that is.
Marinetti’s
Futurist Manifesto was mentioned in the papers a lot last year, its 100th anniversary. I have a friend in the area, a 90-year-old widow of a second-generation Futurist painter, Mino della Site, who did painting after painting of airplanes. The things still sell a lot.
I guess that writing about high tech now would be comparable to writing about machinery then. Only no doubt the rate of change is faster with electronic and digital innovations.