Ezra Pound on machines:

Machines are not really literary or poetic, an attempt to poetise machines is rubbish. There has been a great deal of literary fuss over this. The Kiplonians get as sentimental over machines as a Dickensian does over a starved and homeless orphan on a bleak cold winterrrr’s night.
Machines are musical. I doubt if they are even very pictorial or sculptural, they have form, but their distinction is not in form, it is in their movement and energy; reduced to sculptural stasis they lose raison d’être, as if their essence [sic].
Let me put it another way, they don’t confront man like the faits accomplish of nature; these latter he has to attack ab exteriore, by his observation, he can’t construct ‘em; he has to examine them. Machines are already an expression of his own desire for power and precision; one man can learn from them what some other man has put into them, just as he can learn from other artistic manifestations. A painting of a machine is like a painting of a painting.
The lessons of machines is precision, valuable to the plastic artist, and to literati. …
I take it that music is the art most fit to express the fine quality of machines. Machines are now a part of life, it is proper that men should feel something about them; there would be something weak about art if it couldn’t deal with this new emotion. But to return to the vorticist demands:
‘Every concept, every emotion presents itself to the vivid consciousness in some primary form, it belongs to the art of that form.’
I am inclined to think that machines acting in time-space, and hardly existing save when in action, belong chiefly to an art acting in time-space; at any rate Antheil has used them, effectively. That is a fait accompli and the academicians can worry over it if they like.”

Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony, 1924/27