During a period of solitary confinement in Butyrka prison in 1909, Vladimir Mayakovsky began to write poetry, but his poems were confiscated, which he later considered lucky as he characterized them as pathetic and weak. In 1911 he joined the Moscow Art School where he became acquainted with members of the Russian Futurist movement. Mayakovsky became a leading spokesman for the group Gileas (Гилея), and a close friend of David Burlyuk, whom he saw as his mentor. As Mayakovsky confessed his poetry started with acquaintance with a line by Andrey Bely Thrust a pineapple into the sky… (poem ‘In the Mountains’ publ. 1904 in Russian «В небеса запустил ананасом»). Burlyuk introduced him to the poetry of Rimbaud, Verlaine, Verhaeren, and Baudelaire.  But the main influence was that of Walt Whitman’s free verse. Mayakovsky dismissed traditional metres and created his own verse rythms. His polyrhythmic compositions are amalgamated by an integral syntactic intonation preset by the graphic form of the poem, in the beginning by segmenting the verse into several lines written in a column, and since 1923 by using his famous “staircase” metre, which became Mayakovsky’s calling card.

A Cloud in Trousers (1915) was Mayakovsky's first major poem of appreciable length and it depicted the heated subjects of love, revolution, religion and art, written from the vantage point of a spurned lover. The language of the work was the language of the streets, and Mayakovsky went to considerable lengths to debunk idealistic and romanticized notions of poetry and poets.

In 1916 he dedicated Mayakovsky the poem The Backbone Flute (1916) to Lilya Brik. The love affair, as well as his impressions of war and socialism, strongly influenced his works of these years. The poem War and the World (1916) addressed the horrors of WWI and Man (1917) is a poem dealing with the anguish of love.

At the beginning of WWI Mayakovsky was rejected as a volunteer, and during 1915-1917 he worked at the Petrograd Military Automobile School as a draftsman. At the onset of the Bolshevik Revolution, Mayakovsky was in Smolny, Petrograd, where he witnessed the October  events. He started reciting poems such as ‘Left March! For the Red Marines: 1918’ (Левый марш (Матросам), 1918) at naval theatres, with sailors as an audience.

The poem Ode to Revolution is part of the collection Poems about Revolution (Стихи о революции) and refers to the events of 1917-1918. It was written in autumn 1917, and along with the poem Our March rather renders the general atmosphere of the revolutionary bewilderment than chants the praises of the October revolution, which in many ways continued the mass massacre of the WWI. Bengt Jangfeldt supposes in his book Med livet som insats: berättelser om Vladimir Majakovskij och hans krets that the poet saluted the February revolution, but did not express equal support for the October events. Jangfeldt’s main argument is that Mayakovsky wrote only some dozen poems in the period between autumn 1917 and autumn 1919. This creative paralysis depended upon the poet’s reserved attitude towards the Bolsheviks’ view of culture. (Cf. Jangfeldt 2007, p. 109-110)

Mayakovsky’s figure is a controversial one due to the fact that he was confabulated and pinnacled by the Soviet state as a man and a revolutionary poet, but his real personality and early lyrics were less appreciated. In spite of criticism and spurns he received in the post-Soviet times his artistic impact and importance within the history of Russian and world poetry remain intact. 

In the cultural climate of the early Soviet Union, his popularity grew rapidly. From 1922 to 1928, Mayakovsky was a prominent member of the Left Art Front and went on to define his work as 'Communist futurism' (комфут). After moving to Moscow, Mayakovsky worked for the Russian State Telegraph Agency (ROSTA) creating — both graphic and text — satirical Agitprop posters. In 1919, he published his first collection of poems Collected Works 1909-1919 (Все сочиненное Владимиром Маяковским).