Poetry of Machado by Antonio Machado

First published: 1907-1926; includes Soledades, galerías, y otros poemas, 1907 (Solitudes, Galleries, and Other Poems, 1987); Campos de Castilla, 1912 (The Castilian Camp, 1982); Nuevas canciones, 1924; De un cancionero apócrifo, 1926

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

The spiritual crisis brought about in Spain by the loss of its last overseas possessions in Spanish America in 1898 found expression through the works of the Spanish writers of the Generation of ’98. Pessimism, analysis of the past, desire for change, and consciousness of history are reflected in productions of Spanish writers of that time.

Spain had actually been suffering a prolonged frustration in its national goals. Most of Spain’s American colonies—discovered, explored, conquered, acculturated, and exploited by the mother country—had obtained their independence during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. A relatively small portion of the old Spanish Empire remained. When Cuba and Puerto Rico gained their freedom, Spain lost all its political links with the American continent. Four centuries of Spanish rule and influence in the Americas had ended.

A strong reaction appeared among the Spanish intelligentsia. Spain was obliged to set new goals, examine its traditions, and reexamine its political life. Philosophers, fiction writers, and essayists put together their efforts to arouse the soul of their country and make it open its eyes to reality and the future. It could be thought that this generation had no place for poets, who are often unconcerned with national affairs. Antonio Machado, however, who is the best poet of the Generation of ’98, fully shared the intellectual and emotional attitude of his age. The development of his themes and his poetic perspective began in the critical years following the last breath of the Spanish Empire. From his first poems Machado shows the concerns of his poetry. He is, in all his books, the poet of time, of melancholy memories, of death, and of concern for his country. He would die in exile.

Perhaps no other Spanish-speaking poet has written so much about the phenomenon of time. For him, poetry is the essential method by which one may communicate with his or her time. Poetry is a way of bridging time and obtaining permanent, intemporal results. In other words, poetry for him is the result of inner, personal experience, in contact with his world, expressed not only by way of ideas, but mainly by way of intuition, with the intention of giving to such experiences a universal value.

Few writers have felt the burden of time as Machado did. A philosopher and poet, he went deep into the analysis of its essence both as a metaphysical entity and as a reality affecting human life. He did not theorize about it; through poetry he tried to grasp its meaning and to present its pathetic impact upon the individual.

Among his preferred ways of meeting time and interpreting his own life, Machado finds in daydreams a fit instrument. For Machado, poetry is also a daydream; life is a permanent attitude of watchful vision with open eyes. Readers can frequently discover in his poetry an ecstatic mood. Rather than recalling his memories, he used to dream of them. For him the true interior life was that of dreams and, conversely, dreams were the best way of knowing his inward being.

These dreams are not the substance of the subconscious, nor are they expressed in a super-realistic manner. They are simply the manifestation of yesterday that presses upon the poet, causing him to live his life again in recollection. In this way they are made present and converted into poetic forms. Time is the span between birth and death. For Machado, who was reared in an educational environment devoid of religious training, death is only a limit, a state of absolute finiteness, rather than the last act of human life or the beginning of a different one. Since nobody can boast of having experienced death, its apprehension is only a concept, the object of belief, not of knowledge. At the same time, death is always possible. As a result of death’s constant imminence, Machado experiences the anguish of death but meets it with a stoic resignation. In his poetry there is neither the cry of rebelliousness nor belief in the immortality of the soul. Sometimes death appears as something connatural with the poet—a companion. The presence of death is sometimes so sharp that Machado suddenly thinks that his end is imminent, but he is appeased by the hope of living more days until he may see the bright morning of death.

“Spain aches me,” was the poignant cry of Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo, one of the writers of the Generation of ’98. It was an attitude shared by all his contemporaries. That generation of Spaniards took as their own the collective problems of their country. These problems were the consequence of many years of national life without collective values and endeavors. Machado devoted his pen to a poetic dissection of his country. The Castilian Camp is his contribution to the most pungent question of his generation: the past and future of Spain.

A doubled Spain appears in this book: the “official” and the “authentic” Spain. For Machado, the two Spains have been living divorced for many years. The “official” has created a Spain of tradition, laziness, individualism, and presumptions. The “authentic” is the Spain of the people, who dream and fight and think and live after their own ideals of honesty, hard work, and patriotism.

Castile is, for the writers of this generation, the heart and symbol of Spain, because it has played a special role in Spanish life for many years. Machado chooses this region and tries to find in it both the constructive and destructive forces that have molded the Spanish soul. The landscape of his vision is chiefly that of Soria, where he spent some important years of his life and where he met his wife, who died a few years later. He remembers his childhood in Seville, merry and colorful, in contrast to a less happy youth in the Castilian plateau.

The Castilian Camp abounds in strong, pessimistic poems, written mainly in the most traditional meters of Spanish poetry: the Alexandrine and the octosyllabic. Machado speaks of poor people, ancient warriors, barren fields, familiar tragedies, and the painful remembrance of his dead wife.

In “The Land of Alvargonzalez,” the longest poem in the book, Machado depicts the tragedy of a rural family. The poet, in bitter, popular, and lyric romanzas, tells a story of envy and murder. The father is killed by his older sons; his farm, which they inherit, becomes arid; and when Miguel, the last born of the brothers, returns rich from the New World, he buys the farm from his brothers. The land flourishes, and his brothers, repentant of their sin, plunge into the Black Lagoon.

The Castilian landscape is frequently associated with his wife, Leonor, dead at the age of seventeen in Soria. This only true love was born, met the poet, married him, and died in the Castilian land. Machado imagines going with her, enjoying the scenery, though the consciousness of her death makes him melancholy. Machado never gave profound expression of religious origin. His education, based on the principles of secularization of thought and the philosophy of positivism, was not concerned with the relationship between divinity and humanity. There is an agnostic attitude in most of his books. His interpellations to God are vague and made among dreams.

In Machado’s poetry some preference is made toward the metaphysical treatment of love. For him, love begins as an abrupt increment of the vital energy, yet with nothing tangible that needs attention. It is like the explosion of spring, an attitude of being escorted by an impersonal and merely suggested companion. A second step in love comes later when a man encounters a real woman, but then, paradoxically, anguish and waste of life plague the lover because in spite of his efforts he cannot yield himself totally to the loved one. When she disappears from the immediate circle of the lover, oblivion comes. Finally, she becomes only a subject of reminiscence and poetry.

Time, the past, dreams, death, love, and the nation are the eternal questions of human life. Poets and philosophers have tried to find some answer to them. Machado, poet and philosopher, made an attempt to find an explanation of himself and his world in a given time and space. He did not succeed, and he did not expect to, but he left the deep, beautiful, tentative testimony of one who thinks that he is only a traveler in this world, condemned to the yoke of time and to obtaining at best a glimpse of life’s mysteries.

Bibliography

Cobb, Carl W. Antonio Machado. New York: Twayne, 1971. An excellent starting point for the discussion of Machado’s poetry. Contains a useful chronology of the poet’s life and works, a good bibliography, and critical analyses of the major poems.

Diaz-Plaja, Guillermo. A History of Spanish Literature. Edited and translated by Hugh A. Harter. New York: New York University Press, 1971. A necessary and interesting introduction not only to Machado’s poetry but also to the famous literary and philosophical group to which he belonged, the Generation of ’98. Highlights the poet’s use of its themes and preoccupations.

Johnston, Philip G. The Power of Paradox in the Work of Spanish Poet Antonio Machado, 1875-1939. Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, 2002. Johnston’s study focuses on two types of paradox: the ambiguities and contradictions in Machado’s work and Machado’s use of paradox as a figure of speech and rhetorical device.

Krogh, Kevin. The Landscape Poetry of Antonio Machado: A Dialogical Study of “Campos de Castilla.” Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, 2001. Examines how the landscape in this collection of poetry is either a “protagonist or coprotagonist with man in the human experience.”

Young, Howard Thomas. The Victorious Expression: A Study of Four Contemporary Poets. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964. In this intricate analysis, the themes, structures, and leitmotifs of Machado’s poetry are juxtaposed and contrasted with those of three of his contemporaries.