Antonio Machado

Antonio Machado Ruiz (Seville, July 26, 1875-Colliure, February 22, 1939) was a Spanish poet, the youngest representative of the generation of '98. modernist cut (like that of his brother Manuel), evolved towards a symbolist intimacy with romantic traits, which matured into a poetry of human commitment, on the one hand, and contemplation of existence, on the other; a synthesis that in Machado's voice echoes the most ancient popular wisdom. In the words of Gerardo Diego, he “spoke in verse and lived in poetry.” He was one of the distinguished students of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (ILE), with whose ideas he was always committed. He died in exile in the death throes of the Second Spanish Republic.

Biography

Childhood in Seville

Portrait of Antonio Machado Álvarez and Ana Ruiz, parents of Antonio

Antonio Cipriano José María Machado Ruiz was born at half past four in the morning on July 26, 1875 (festivity of Santa Ana and therefore the name day of the woman in labor), in one of the rented houses of the so-called Palacio de las Dueñas, in Seville. He was the second boy his mother, Ana Ruiz Hernández, gave birth to, out of a total of eight offspring. Eleven months earlier, Manuel, the firstborn, had been born, a companion in many passages of Antonio's life, and over time also a poet and playwright.

The corner of the pool in one of the courtyards of the Palace of the Dueñas, in one of whose homes was born, in 1875, Antonio Machado.

Machado's mother's family owned a sweet shop in the Triana neighborhood, and his father, Antonio Machado Álvarez, was a lawyer, journalist and folklore researcher, work for which he would become internationally recognized under the pseudonym « Demófilo". Neighbors in another house in the same palace are his paternal grandparents, the doctor and naturalist Antonio Machado Núñez, professor and rector of the University of Seville and a convinced institutionalist, and his wife, Cipriana Álvarez Durán, whose love of painting An example of this was a portrait of Antonio Machado at the age of four.

The Sevillian childhood of Antonio Machado was evoked in many of his poems almost photographically:

My childhood are memories of a patio in Seville
And a clear orchard where the lemon grows...

«Portrait», Campos de Castilla (CXVII).

And again, in a sonnet evoking his father he writes:

This light of Seville... It's the palace.
where I was born, with his rumor of source.
My father, in his office. - High front,
the brief fly, and the whitish moustache.

Sonnets (IV).

In 1883, grandfather Antonio, at the age of sixty-eight and with the support of Giner de los Ríos and other Krausist colleagues, won an opposition to the chair of Zoography of Living and Fossil Joints at the Central University of Madrid. The family agrees to move to the Spanish capital where the Machado children will have access to the pedagogical methods of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza. José Luis Cano, in his biography of Machado, recounts that one spring morning, before leaving for Madrid, "Demófilo" took his children to Huelva to learn about the sea.

In a more recent study, Gibson notes that Machado himself wrote to Juan Ramón Jiménez in 1912 evoking "...sensations from my childhood, when I lived in those Atlantic ports".

In any case, those "contrails in the sea" would remain engraved on the poet's retina.

Student in Madrid

On September 8, 1883, the train in which the Machado family was traveling arrived at the Atocha station.

From eight to thirty-two years I have lived in Madrid except for the year 1899 and 1902 that I spent in Paris. I was educated in the Free Institution of Teaching and I have great love for my teachers: Giner de los Ríos, the unthinkable Cossío, Caso, Sela, Sama (now dead), Rubio, Costa (D. Joaquín—who I have not seen since my nine years). I went through the Institute and the University, but from these centers I have no more trace than a great aversion to all academics.

Antonio Machado, Autobiography.

Ten days later, Manuel (nine years old), Antonio (eight years old) and José (four years old), enter the provisional premises of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza. Over the next few years, his teachers will be Giner de los Ríos himself, Manuel Bartolomé Cossío, Joaquín Costa, José de Caso, Aniceto Sela, Joaquín Sama, Ricardo Rubio, and other lesser-known teachers such as José Ontañón, Rafael Torres Campos. or German Florez. Among his companions were: Julián Besteiro, Juan Uña, José Manuel Pedregal, Pedro Jiménez-Landi, Antonio Vinent or the brothers Eduardo and Tomás García del Real.

The Institution, in coherent harmony with the family environment of the Machados, would mark their intellectual ideology. With the ILE, Machado discovered the Guadarrama. In his elegy to maestro Giner, from 1915, Machado concludes:

There the master one day
I dreamed of a new flower of Spain.

«To Don Francisco Giner de Los Ríos».

On May 16, 1889, Machado (who was barely three months away from his fourteenth birthday) attended the San Isidro Institute, where the Free Institution was then registered, to pass the revalidation for admission to the state baccalaureate. In June he passes Geography, but fails Latin and Spanish, and his file is awarded to the Cardenal Cisneros Institute for the 1889-1890 academic year.

Meanwhile, the economy at the Machado home, which had been tight for years, reached a critical level. Ana Ruiz had just had her ninth and last delivery, a girl born on October 3, 1890 who would die years later. Her husband, an exhausted, disillusioned, forty-year-old "Demófilo" with seven children, decided to accept the lawyer's position offered to him by some friends in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

After obtaining permission from the Ministry of Overseas, Antonio Machado Álvarez (father of Antonio Machado) embarked for the New Continent in August 1892. He did not achieve fortune but the misfortune of fulminant tuberculosis that ended his life, without reaching to be forty-seven years old. He died in Seville on February 4, 1893.

Madrid Bohemian

In 1895, Antonio Machado had not yet finished high school. The following year, two days before his twenty-first birthday, his grandfather, the Krausist wrestler, Giner's close friend and eminent zoologist Antonio Machado Núñez, died. The family loss was joined by the economic disaster of a family of which Juan Ramón Jiménez would leave this cruel portrait in his book Modernism. Course notes: «[...] Grandma becomes a widow and gives her a house. Useless mother. They all live small income grandmother. Dismantled house. Family pawns furniture. Men no longer work. House of the picaresque. Sale of old books".

Idlely, the young Machado brothers, then inseparable, indulged in the attractive bohemian life of Madrid at the end of the 19th century. Artists' cafes, tablaos, literary gatherings, the fronton and the bulls, everything interests them. They are dazzled by the grotesque rebellion of a Valle-Inclán and a Sawa or the personality of actors like Antonio Vico and Ricardo Calvo Agostí; In the literary sphere, they made friends with a Zayas or a Villaespesa and, in general, allowed themselves to be stimulated by the public life of most of the intellectuals of the time.

In October 1896, Antonio Machado, passionate about theater, became a meritorious member of the theater company led by María Guerrero and Fernando Díaz de Mendoza. The poet himself will humorously recall his career as an actor: "[...] I was one of those holding Manelic, at the end of the second act". The dark and luminous bohemia of Madrid at the end of the century XIX alternated with the collaboration of both brothers in the writing of a Dictionary of similar ideas, directed by the Republican former minister Eduardo Benot. It was inevitable that the young Machados would feel the attraction of Paris.

Paris-Madrid

In June 1899, Antonio Machado traveled to Paris, where his brother Manuel was already waiting for him. In the French capital they worked for Editorial Garnier, got in touch with Enrique Gómez Carrillo and Pío Baroja, discovered Paul Verlaine and had the opportunity to meet Oscar Wilde and Jean Moreas. Antonio returned to Madrid in October of that same year, increasing his deal with the "higher staff" of modernism, an active Francisco Villaespesa, an itinerant Rubén Darío and a young man from Moguer, Juan Ramón Jiménez.

In April 1902, Antonio and Manuel made their second trip to Paris. There they meet another brother, Joaquín (El viajero ), who returns from his American experience "sick, lonely and poor", and Antonio returns with him to Spain on August 1. At the end of That year, back in Madrid, the poet delivered his first book to the A. Álvarez printer Soledades (1899-1902).

Between 1903 and 1908, the poet collaborated in various literary magazines: Helios (published by Juan Ramón Jiménez), Blanco y Negro, Alma Española, Latin Renaissance or The Republic of Letters. He also signed the protest manifesto following the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to José Echegaray. In 1906, on Giner's advice, he prepared for exams to become a French teacher in Secondary Education Institutes, which he obtained the following year.

In 1907 he published in Madrid, with the bookseller and publisher Gregorio Pueyo, his second book of poems, Soledades. Galleries. Other poems (an expanded version of Soledades). The poet took possession of his place at the institute in the Soria capital on May 1 and joined it in September. Different versions have speculated about the reasons that Machado may have had for choosing Soria, at that time the smallest provincial capital in Spain, with just over seven thousand inhabitants. Perhaps it seemed to him the closest square to Madrid to which his scarce curriculum allowed him to access (of the three vacancies, Soria, Baeza and Mahón, which remained free from the total list of seven). Ángel Lázaro left written what the poet himself answered, when friends asked him about his decision:

I had a very beautiful memory of Andalusia, where I spent my childhood years happy. The Quintero brothers then premiered in Madrid The cheerful genius, and someone said to me: ‘Go to see her. In that comedy is all Andalusia’. And I went to see her, and I thought, "If this is really Andalusia, I prefer Soria." And Soria left.

Antonio Machado in González (1986).

In Soria

The Machado of symbolist Paris and bohemian Madrid reflected in his Soledades y Galerías gave way to a different man in the stark reality of Soria: «... five years in Soria» —he would later write in 1917—"they directed my eyes and my heart towards what was essentially Spanish..." —and he adds— "My ideology was also very different." In the literary sphere, this was reflected in his next book, Campos from Castile; professionally, he began his life as a village teacher; sentimentally, he discovered Leonor, the great love of his life.

Eleanor

Photo of Leonor Left on the day of his wedding on July 30, 1909

In December 1907, when the pension where Machado lived was closed, the guests moved to a new establishment located in what was then called Plaza de Teatinos. In the new pension, run by Isabel Cuevas and her husband Ceferino Izquierdo, a retired Civil Guard sergeant, fate would have it that the poet met Leonor Izquierdo, the eldest daughter, and still barely a thirteen-year-old girl. Machado was so intense that for perhaps the first time in his life he was impatient, and when he was certain that his love was reciprocated, he agreed to commit to Leonor's mother. A little over a year had passed, and the couple still had to wait for another until she reached the legal age of marriage. And so, on July 30, 1909, the ceremony was held in the church of Santa María la Mayor in Soria. Leonor turned fifteen a month ago and the poet is thirty-four. And against all odds, the marriage was a model of understanding and happiness, to such an extent that the bride fell in love with the poet's work with all the illusion of her youth. This has been reported by all the witnesses of this episode in the life of Antonio Machado.

In Soria, the spirit of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, always alive in the poet, led him to undertake a series of excursions through the Sierra de Urbión and its pine forests, to the sources of the Duero River and the Black Lagoon, the setting for tragic scene of The Land of Alvargonzález, Machado's longest poem. From Soria was also his friendship with José María Palacio, editor of Tierra soriana , the local newspaper, and one of the few with whom he shared concerns and ideologies in the harsh Castilian wasteland.

In December 1910, Leonor and Antonio traveled to Paris, with a scholarship awarded to the poet by the Board for the Extension of Studies to improve their knowledge of French for a year. During the first six months, the couple traveled, visited museums and became intimate with Rubén Darío and Francisca Sánchez, his partner. Machado took the opportunity to attend the course that Henri Bergson taught at the College of France.

On July 14, 1911, when the couple was leaving for French Brittany on vacation, Eleanor suffered a hemoptysis and had to be admitted. The doctors, powerless at that time against tuberculosis, recommended her return to the healthy air of Soria. A deceitful improvement led to a sudden end, passing away on August 1, 1912. Her last joy was to have in her hands, finally published, the book that she had seen grow excited day by day: the first edition of Campos de Castilla.

In Baeza

Lecturer at the Baeza Institute in the column courtyard. 1918. Photograph by Francisco Baras.

Desperate, Machado requested his transfer to Madrid, but the only vacant destination was Baeza, where for the next seven years he suffered more than he lived, dedicated to teaching as a French Grammar teacher at the Baccalaureate institute installed in the old Baezana University.

This Baeza, called the Andalusian Salamanca, has an Institute, a Seminary, a School of Arts, several Secondary Schools, and barely knows how to read thirty percent of the population. There is only one library where postal cards, devotionals and clerical and pornographic newspapers are sold. It is the richest region of Jaen, and the city is populated of beggars and lords ruined in roulette.

Antonio Machado (from a letter to Unamuno in 1913)

The poet is not willing to compromise and his gaze is radicalized; The only things that take him out of his indignation and boredom are the excursions he makes on foot and alone, through the hills that separate him from Úbeda, or with the few friends who visit him, through the Cazorla and Segura mountains, at the sources of the Guadalquivir. He also had the opportunity to get closer to the voices and rhythms of the popular treasure (not in vain did he inherit his father's passion for folklore, which in turn he had inherited from Machado's grandmother, Cipriana Álvarez Durán).. A large part of this look will be the result of his next book, New Songs .

Escape from the "manchego town" was not easy; To achieve this, Machado was forced to study on his own, between 1915 and 1918, the career of Philosophy and Letters. With this new title on his diminished curriculum, he requested a transfer to the Segovia Institute, which on this occasion was granted. Machado left Baeza in the fall of 1919.

From 1912 and during the seven years of his stay in Baeza, Antonio Machado frequently travels to Madrid, where his family resides, has friends of the world of letters and collaborates with important periodicals, among other activities such as his participation in the named Spanish Political Education League or his presence in sound conferences of Miguel de Unamuno, besides having to examine himself at the University of Madrid as a free student of studies of the Bachelor's degree in Lettura ]

Antonio Chicharro

Shortly before, on June 8, 1916, Machado had met a young poet, with whom he had been friends ever since, whose name was Federico García Lorca.

Segovia-Madrid

Machado arrived in Segovia on November 26, 1919 and ended up settling in an even more modest pension for the very modest price of 3.50 pesetas a day. It was November 1919 and the poet arrived on time to participate in the founding of the Universidad Popular Segoviana together with other characters such as the Marquis de Lozoya, Blas Zambrano, Ignacio Carral, Mariano Quintanilla, Alfredo Marqueríe or the architect Javier Dodero, who was in charge of restoring and adapting the old Romanesque temple of San Quirce, one of the spaces in which the innovative institution had proposed as its objective the free education of the Segovian people.

He held the Chair of French at the General and Technical Institute of the city. In this center he will give classes until 1932, acting as deputy director for several years.

Machado, who now had the advantage of being close to Madrid, visited the capital every weekend, participating again in the country's cultural life with such dedication that he often "missed the train back to Segovia on many Mondays, and quite a few Tuesdays". This new status of bohemian profile would allow him to recover theatrical activity together with his brother Manuel.

In Segovia, for his part, he was a regular at the gathering of San Gregorio that —between 1921 and 1927— met every afternoon in the pottery of the ceramist Fernando Arranz, installed in the ruins of a Romanesque church, in which they participated also friends like Blas Zambrano (professor at the Normal School and father of María Zambrano), Manuel Cardenal Iracheta, the sculptor Emiliano Barral and some other picturesque types (such as Carranza, a cadet at the Artillery Academy, or Father Villalba, who played music to a text by Machado).

In 1927, Antonio Machado was elected a member of the Royal Spanish Academy, although he never took possession of his chair. In a letter to Unamuno, the poet comments on the news with healthy irony: «It is an honor to which I never aspired; I will almost dare to say that I aspired never to have it. But God gives a handkerchief to whom he has no noses... ».

Guiomar

Retreated by Leandro Oroz (1925)

In June 1928, Pilar de Valderrama traveled alone to Segovia and, under the pretext of coming out of a depression with a cure of rest and solitude, stayed at the best hotel in the city. However, and as the letter of introduction to Antonio Machado that he had obtained from the actor Ricardo Calvo would reveal, the real objective of the trip was to initiate a chaste professional friendship with the poet (which if it became really chaste, the events of its denouement would show that it was not entirely honest).

Pilar belonged to the high bourgeoisie of Madrid; she married and mother of three children, she was the author of several books of poems. For almost nine years she served as the muse and "dark object of desire" for a rejuvenated Machado who immortalized that poetic mirage with the name Guiomar. Since the publication in 1950 of the book From Antonio Machado to his great and secret love, written by Concha Espina and making public a collection of letters between Machado and a mysterious but real Guiomar, several and varied studies have been devoted to the Guiomar phenomenon. Everything seems to indicate that Pilar de Valderrama was never in love with Machado (although as a good courtesan she was skilled in the art of "making the partridge dizzy"), as seems to be deduced from what is written in her memoir Yes, I am Guiomar, a book written in his old age and published posthumously, to insist on the platonic nature of his relationship with the poet, but without explaining why, if so, it was kept secret with such zeal. Nor did Guiomar's inspirer explain why she burned most of the letters she received from Machado, when—perhaps warned by her contacts among the wealthy class—she left Madrid, heading for Estoril, in June 1936, a month before the coup d'état..

April 14 in Segovia

The last great event of Machado's Segovian years occurred on April 14, 1931, the date of the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic. The poet, who lives the news in Segovia, was asked to be one of those in charge of raising the tricolor flag on the balcony of the City Hall. An emotional moment that Machado would remember with these words:

Those hours, my God, weave all of them with the purest line of hope, when a few old Republicans weave the tricolor flag in the City of Segovia! (...) With the first leaves of the huts and the last flowers of the almond trees, spring brought our republic by hand.

Antonio Machado

Republican Madrid

In October 1931, the Republic finally granted Machado a chair of French in Madrid, where from 1932 he was able to live again with his family (his mother, his brother José, wife and daughters).. In the capital, the poet continued to meet secretly with Guiomar's inspiration and premiere the comedies written with Manuel.

In a government order of March 19, 1932, at the request of the secretary of the Board of Pedagogical Missions, Machado was authorized to reside in Madrid "for the organization of the Popular Theater".

During the next few years, Machado wrote less poetry but increased his production of prose, frequently publishing in Diario de Madrid and El Sol and definitively outlining his two apocrypha, the thinkers (and like Machado, poets and teachers) Juan de Mairena and Abel Martín.

In 1935, Machado moved from the Calderón de la Barca Institute to the Cervantes Institute. Days before, on September 1, his teacher Cossío had died, shortly after having met him in his retreat in the Sierra de Guadarrama and in the company of other institutionalists, Ángel Llorca and Luis Álvarez Santullano. The losses accumulate: on January 5 Valle-Inclán dies and on April 9 a forgotten Francisco Villaespesa... the parade of death had come early.

The Civil War

Almost from the first days of the war, Madrid, already convulsed since the last throes of the second biennium, became a fertile field for deprivation and death. The Alliance of Intellectuals decided, among many other emergency measures, to evacuate a series of writers and artists to safer areas, Machado among them (due to his advanced age and significance). The offer, one day in November 1936, was presented at the poet's home by two other illustrious colleagues: Rafael Alberti and León Felipe. Machado, “concentrated and sad” – as Alberti would later evoke – refused to leave. A second visit was necessary with greater insistence and on the condition that his brothers Joaquín and José, with his families, accompanied him along with his mother.

In Rocafort

Publication on cover of the newspaper The Vanguard on Friday, July 16, 1937: «The Poet and the People», speech by Antonio Machado for the II International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture organized by the Alliance of Antifascist Intellectuals and held in Valencia.

Machado and his family, after being provisionally welcomed at the Casa de la Cultura in Valencia, settled in Villa Amparo, a chalet in the town of Rocafort, from the end of November 1936 until April 1938, the date they were evacuated to Barcelona. During his stay in Valencia, the poet, despite the progressive deterioration of his health, tirelessly wrote comments, articles, analyses, poems and speeches (such as the one he delivered for the Unified Socialist Youth, in a public square in Valencia before a massive audience), and attended the II International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture organized by the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals and held in the Valencian capital, where he read his reflection entitled "The poet and the people". the last days of the Congress, the second national conference of the Association of Friends of the Soviet Union was held during which their positions were renewed and Antonio Mach was elected as a member of its national committee.

In 1937 he published La guerra, with illustrations by his younger brother José Machado Ruiz. Among his latest writings, a work of historical and testimonial commitment, texts of shocking depth stand out, such as the elegy dedicated to Federico García Lorca: The crime was in Granada .

Stopover in Barcelona

Faced with the danger that Valencia would be isolated, the Machados moved to Barcelona, where after provisional lodging at the Hotel Majestic, they occupied the Torre Castañer estate. The luxury of the place contrasts with the miseries of war: there is no coal for the stoves, nor the essential tobacco, and hardly any food. There they remained from the end of May 1938 until the first days of the following year.

Exile and death

On January 22, 1939, and in view of the imminent occupation of the city by the forces of the rebellious side, the poet and his family left Barcelona in a vehicle from the Directorate of Health obtained by Dr. José Puche Álvarez; They are accompanied, among other friends, by the philosopher Joaquín Xirau, the philologist Tomás Navarro Tomás, the Catalan humanist Carlos Riba, the novelist Corpus Barga and an endless caravan of hundreds of thousands of anonymous Spaniards fleeing their homeland.

After one last night on Spanish soil, in Viladasens, the forty people that made up the group covered the last stretch towards exile. Barely half a kilometer from the border with France, they had to abandon the Health cars, bottled up in the collapse of the flight. Their suitcases were also left there, at the foot of the long slope that had to be traveled through the rain and the evening cold to the French customs, which only thanks to the efforts of Corpus Barga (who had a residence permit in France) were able to get over. Some cars took them to the Cerbère railway station, where thanks to Xirau's influence they were allowed to spend the night in a wagon parked on the siding.

The next morning, with the help of Navarro Tomás and Corpus Barga, they traveled by train to Collioure (France), where the group found shelter on the afternoon of January 28, at the Bougnol-Quintana Hotel. There they were waiting for help that would not arrive on time.

Tomb of Antonio Machado and his mother, Ana Ruiz, in the cemetery of Colliure (France)

Antonio Machado died at half past three in the afternoon on February 22, 1939, Ash Wednesday.

José Machado would later recount that his mother, emerging for a few moments from the state of semi-consciousness in which the hardships of the trip had plunged her, and seeing her son's bed empty next to his, asked anxiously for him. She did not believe the white lies she was told and began to cry. She died on February 25, just the day she turned eighty-five years old, making effective the promise she made out loud in Rocafort: "I am willing to live as long as my son Antonio." Ana Ruiz was buried next to her son in the niche given by a neighbor from Collioure, in the small cemetery of the French town where her remains have rested since then.

Late, heart... Not everything.
The land has swallowed it.

Antonio Machado in Gibson (2006).

Post-mortem purification and rehabilitation

Like all Secondary Education teachers, he was subjected to a purge file by the Francoist authorities. Purification Commission C of Madrid requested a report from the Instituto Cervantes in Madrid where he had his professorship and the center's management informed the Commission that he had died "according to newspaper reports." So, without requesting more information, the definitive separation of the body of professors from the Institute was decreed on July 7, 1941, two years after having died in exile. Long before, at the beginning of the Spanish civil war, Machado's classmates from the Segovia Institute where he had also been had declared him undesirable along with other professors who defended republican legality and sent a note to the local newspaper El Adelantado de Segovia that published it on November 27, 1936. It said:

Recently published and by different media different actions, imputed to the former professors of this institute Antonio Machado Ruiz, Rubén Landa Vaz and Jaén Morente, unquestionably censorable, by anti-patriotics and contrary to the National Movement, the cloister of this center could not be shown alien... in session held on November 11, declared such gentlemen undesirable and esteeming us at the same time as their names.

It was not until 1981 that he was rehabilitated (with the same formula) as a professor at the Instituto Cervantes in Madrid, by ministerial order of a democratic government. Several authors have studied whether or to what degree Machado was a Freemason. According to António Apolinário Lourenço, the acceptance of this fact would be "practically unanimous", although he highlights the null activity of the poet in activities of the order. For the Hispanist Paul Aubert, although he does not rule out the possibility, there is no evidence of his connection with any lodge, although he points out his contacts with members of Freemasonry.

Self Portrait

In a brief autobiography almost improvised by Machado in 1913, he wrote down some personal keys that better outline his human profile than any critical study:

I have a great love for Spain and a completely negative idea of Spain. All the Spanish I love and I am outraged at the same time. My life is made more of resignation than of rebelliousness; but from when I feel battle-driven impulses that coincide with momentary optimism of which I repent and smile a little indefectably. I am more self-inspective than observer and understand the injustice of pointing out in the neighbor what I notice in myself. My thinking is generally occupied by what Kant calls conflicts of transcendental ideas and I seek in poetry a relief to this ingrateful fame. In the background I am a believer in a spiritual reality opposed to the sensitive world.

Antonio Machado, Autobiography.

Ideology

I believe that the Spanish woman attains an insurmountable virtue and that the decay of Spain depends on the predominance of the woman and its enormous superiority over the male. I repulse the policy where I see the enchantment of the countryside by the influence of the city. I hate the worldly clergy that seems to me another peasant degradation. In general I like more popular than the social aristocratic and more the countryside than the city. The national problem seems to me irresolvable because of the lack of spiritual virility; but I think it should be fought for the future and create a faith that we do not have. I believe more useful the truth that condemns the present, than the prudence that saves the present at the cost always of the coming. Faith in life and the dogma of usefulness seem to me dangerous and absurd. It is appropriate to fight the Catholic Church and proclaim the right of the people to conscience and I am convinced that Spain will die by spiritual asphyxiation if it does not break that iron bond. There are no more obstacles to this than hypocrisy and shyness. This is not a question of culture — it can be very cult and respect the fictitious and immoral — but of conscience. Consciousness is prior to alphabet and bread.

Antonio Machado, Autobiography.

Iconography

Among the numerous gallery of literary, pictorial and photographic portraits composed and preserved by Antonio Machado, it is worth highlighting some that on different occasions have been described as masterful and that make up his universal iconography.

Documents of undoubted historical-artistic value are the various portraits and drawings that his brother José dedicated to him throughout his life, taken from nature or from photographs of the poet. Of greater artistic value are the oil portrait that Sorolla painted de Machado in December 1917; the pencil made by Leandro Oroz in 1925, and the almost avant-garde oil painting by Cristóbal Ruiz, in 1927.

Perhaps the most popular chapter of the poet's iconography is made up of the photographic portraits that the two Alfonsos (Alfonso Sánchez García and his son Alfonso Sánchez Portela) made of Machado between 1910 and 1936. Especially the Portrait of profile from 1927, and the Portrait of Las Salesas café.

Work

Drawing of Antonio Machado. Temporary exhibition For the defense of culture in the Centro del Carmen de Valencia.

As an elementary literary analysis, Max Aub collected in his Manual of the History of Spanish Literature the well-known syllogism that states that if Unamuno represented "a way of feeling" and Ortega "a way of thinking" Machado represents "a way of being." Max Aub completed the portrait, qualifying in that way of being: "the romantic lineage, the simple goodness, the intellectual vigor and the sincere melancholy".

His poetic work began with Soledades, written between 1901 and 1902, and almost rewritten in Soledades. Galleries. Other poems , which he published in October 1907.

During his stay in Soria, Machado wrote his most 1990s-era book, Campos de Castilla, published by the Renacimiento publishing house in 1912. Its protagonists are the Castilian lands and the men who inhabit them. It was followed by the first edition of his Complete Poems (1917), in which the previous books were increased with new poems and the poems written in Baeza after Leonor's death were added, the popular "Proverbs and songs» —“short poems, of a reflective and sententious character”—, and a collection of texts of social criticism, drawing the Spain of that moment. In 1924 he published the Nuevas canciones, recovering materials written in Baeza and even in Soria, and mixing examples of sententious gnomic poetry and analysis of the fact of poetic creation, with dream landscapes, some galleries and the first known sonnets of him.

The editions of Complete Poems of 1928 and 1933 included some of the texts adjudicated to his two apocrypha, "Juan de Mairena" and "Abel Martín" – Mairena's teacher -, and in the edition from 1933 the first Songs to Guiomar.

In 1936, on the eve of the Spanish Civil War, he published: Juan de Mairena. Sentences, graces, notes and memories of an apocryphal professor. The outbreak of the military rebellion prevented the dissemination of the volume, which for years remained in limbo of the unknown.

Abel Martin and Juan de Mairena

Estatua de Machado ante el Teatro Juan Bravo en la plaza Mayor de Segovia

Juan de Mairena and Abel Martín, Machado's heteronyms (he himself came to recognize that Mairena was his "philosophical self"), displaced the modernist and symbolist poet, replacing him with an original, profound thinker and precursor of a mixed genre who would later be imitated by many other authors. Originally conceived as poets, Martín and Mairena present themselves as popular philosophers, heirs of the "made language" (which the poet always quoted about Cervantes and Don Quixote) and in defense of the «spoken language», in the words of Machado: «Let us rehabilitate the word in its integral value. Music, painting and a thousand other things are made with the word; but above all, it is spoken».

A large part of Juan de Mairena, published by Espasa-Calpe in 1936, brings together the collection of essays that Machado had published in the Madrid press since 1934. Through its pages, an imaginary professor and his students analyze society, culture, art, literature, politics, philosophy, raised with a whimsical variety of tones, from the apparent frivolity to the maximum seriousness, going through the sentence, the paradox, the adage, erudition, introspection, rhetoric as art, cuchufleta or the finest and most subtle Celtiberian humor.

Theater

During the 1920s and early 1930s, Machado wrote drama in collaboration with his brother Manuel. The following works were premiered in Madrid: Misfortunes of Fortune or Julianillo Valcárcel (1926), Juan de Mañara (1927), Las adelfas (1928), La Lola is going to the ports (1929), Cousin Fernanda (1931) and The Duchess of Benamejí (1932).

Auto-poetics

Title page of the first edition Complete poetry by Antonio Machado, with autograph and photo of the author (taken by 1917, at his teaching stage in Baeza). Fondos de la Biblioteca del Ateneo de Madrid.

The verb

The adjective and the name
clean water remnants
They're verb accidents.
in lyric grammar
of today that will be tomorrow
of yesterday that is still.

Complementary1914 and New songs"From my wallet" 1917-1930

Poetic time

Poetry is, Mairena said, the dialogue of man, of a man with his time. That is what the poet intends to eternize, taking it out of time, difficult work and which takes a long time, almost all the time the poet has. The poet is a fisherman, not fish, but live fish; let us understand: fish that can live after fish.

Juan de Mairena (IX), 1936.

Mundane Time

Poet yesterday, today sad and poor
philosopher,
I have in copper coins yesterday's gold changed.

Galleries (XCV. "World Cups"), 1907.

Says monotony
from the clear water as it falls:
One day is like another day;
today is the same as yesterday

Soledades1889-1907.

Philosophical Time

Our hours are minutes
When we expect to know,
and centuries when we know
what you can learn.

Campos de Castilla"CXXXVI. Proverbs and Songs", 1912

Dialogue

Yesterday I dreamed I saw
God and God spoke;
And I dreamed that God heard me...
Then I dreamed I dreamed.

Campos de Castilla"CXXXVI.Proverbs and Songs", 1912

Symbols

Much literature has been written on "Machadian symbols". Any reader of his poetry, after a simple and brief look at one of Antonio Machado's many poetic anthologies, will be able to enumerate: road, fountain, dream, cypress, water, night, sea, garden, soul, evening, spring, death, solitudes...

Or I can kill one day.
in my soul, when awakening, that person
that made me the world while I was sleeping.

The rhyme

Let us remember today Gustavo Adolfo, the one of the poor rhymes, the indefinite asonance and the four verbs for each defined adjective. Someone has said with no doubt: "Bécquer, a accordion played by an angel." As the angel of true poetry.

Juan de Mairena —XLIII. About Bécquer, 1936.

Images

Of the suprarealists would have said Juan de Mairena: They have not yet understood those mules of noria that there is no no noria without water

Juan de Mairena XLIX, 1936)

Poetics

• "Before writing a poem," said Mairena to his students, "it is worth imagining the poet capable of writing it. Once our work is finished, we can keep the poet with his poem, or dispense with the poet—as it is usually done—and publish the poem; or throw the poem at the bottom of the papers and stay with the poet, or finally stay without either of us, always keeping the imaginative man for new poetic experiences." (Juan de Mairena —XXII—, 1936)

Publication timeline

As a guide, and according to its publication date:

Poetry

• 1903 - Soledades: Poetry
• 1907 - Soledades. Galleries. Other poems
• 1912 - Campos de Castilla
• 1917 - Pages chosen
• 1917 - Complete poetry
• 1917 - Poems
• 1918 - Soledades and other poetry
• 1919 - Soledades, galleries and other poems
• 1924 - New songs
• 1928 - Complete poetry (1899-1925)
• 1933 - Complete poetry (1899-1930)
• 1933 - The land of Alvargonzález
• 1936 - Complete poetry
• 1937 - War (1936-1937)
• 1937 - Madrid: bastion of our war of independence
• 1938 - The land of Alvargonzález and Songs of the High Duero

Prose

• 1936 - Juan de Mairena (sents, donaries, notes and memories of an apocryphal professor)
• 1957 - Complementary (postuma compilation by Guillermo de Torre published in Buenos Aires by Editorial Losada).
• 1994 - Letters to Pilar (G. C. Depretis edition, in Madrid with Anaya-Mario Muchnik).
• 2004 - The Macedonian fund of Burgos. AM papers (edit of A. B. Ibáñez Pérez, in Burgos by the Fernán González Institution).

Theater

(with Manuel Machado)

• 1926 - Fortunes or Julianillo Valcárcel
• 1927 - Juan de Mañara
• 1928 - The alphas
• 1930 - The Lola goes to the ports
• 1930 - The cousin Fernanda
• 1932 - The duchess of Benamejí
• 1932 - Full theatre, I, Madrid, Renaissance.
• 1947 The man who died in the war (homes in Buenos Aires)

(adaptations of classics, in collaboration)

• 1924 - The one convicted of mistrust, by Tirso de Molina (with José López Hernández), premiered on January 2, 1924, at the Teatro Español de Madrid, with Ricardo Calvo as the main protagonist.
• 1924 - Hernani, by Victor Hugo (with Francisco Villaespesa), premiered on January 1, 1925, at the Teatro Español de Madrid, by the company of María Guerrero and Fernando Díaz de Mendoza.
• 1926 - The silver girlfrom Lope de Vega (with José López Hernández).

In sculpture

The heads of Pablo Serrano

On June 19, 2007, the last “head” by Antonio Machado of the almost legendary series carried out by the sculptor Pablo Serrano for years was installed in the gardens of the National Library of Madrid, on a pedestal by the designer Alberto Corazón. sixty. Before, in 1981, another "head" of Don Antonio had been given as a gift by Serrano and exhibited in the museum of the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts, and one more in Soria in 1982, in front of the school where the poet taught his classes. from French. The supposed "original head" of the entire series could finally be placed in Baeza in 1983.

In 1985 a new head decorated the monument titled "The People of Madrid to the poet Antonio Machado", in the Madrid neighborhood City of Poets and next to the metro station which also bears his name.

Outside Spain, you can see "cabezas" Machado at the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris (Serrano's work from 1962, acquired by the French institution in 1971), another at MOMA in New York, apparently purchased in 1967, and a third at Brown University in Providence (Rhode Island) (United States).

Street sculptures

You could not miss representations of the poet "light baggage", abounding in the fashion of street sculptures. Bronze Machados can be seen, walking, sitting reading or thinking, absent from the chair held by his beloved Leonor, with the suitcase at hand... The passer-by will meet them in the cities of Machado: Soria, Segovia, Baeza.

Antonio Machado by Barral (about 1920-22)

In 1922, Emiliano Barral concluded and gave Machado a white bust of the poet. A copy made by Pedro Barral recalls from a corner of the garden that gives access to the Machado House-Museum in Segovia those verses that united the two artists in eternity:

...and, so the bow of my eyebrow,
Two eyes of a distant sight,
I wish I had
as they are in your sculpture:
dug in hard stone,
- in stone, not to see.

Acknowledgments

In addition to the various sculptures dedicated to the poet, among the numerous recognitions dedicated to Antonio Machado, his work and his memory, the following can be mentioned randomly:

Plate in honor of Antonio Machado at the former university of Baeza. As a Institute of Baccalaureate, the poet taught here French grammar classes from 1912 to 1919.

• Even in the life of the poet, Machado was honored in Soria and declared the Adoptive Son of the city on October 5, 1932.
• The homage that from the Hispanic Institute, in the United States, paid him on the tenth anniversary of his death, friends in exile, with a committee formed by: Tomás Navarro Tomás, Jorge Guillén, Rafael Heliodoro Valle, Federico de Onís, Arturo Torres- Rioseco, Andrés Iduarte, Eugenio Florit and Gabriel Pradal.
• The exhibition tribute to the Spanish artists in Paris, immortalized by the autograph poster made by Pablo Picasso, dated January 3, 1955.
• The poster by Joan Miró in 1966 for the frustrated homage to Machado in Baeza.
• The album Dedicated to Antonio Machado, poet (1969), by the singer Joan Manuel Serrat, who contributed to the recovery and popularization of the poet.
• Angel González, one of the most applied biographers and scholars of the figure and the work of Antonio Machado, also dedicated some of his most personal poems, such as the choice he included in his third book Elementary Degree (1962), entitled "Camposanto en Colliure".
• The historian Manuel Tuñón de Lara dedicated his book Antonio Machado, poet of the village (1967), in addition to numerous articles, to whom he was his favorite poet. In the title "The Great Issues of Spanish Culture in the Present Time"(American Journals, No. 6, 1964), placed Machado as "the prototype of the intellectual for his example and his humanistic work".
• As in the case of other members of the 98 generation, its name has been reflected in numerous streetways of Spanish cities; thus, for example, in Madrid in an avenue between the neighborhoods of Valdezarza and Ciudad Universitaria, in the Moncloa-Aravaca district, coinciding with the opening of one of the stations of the 7 Metro Madrid.