Antonio Machado

Antonio Machado
Antonio Machado is, alongside Miguel de Unamuno and Federico Garcia Lorca, the 20th century Spanish poet whose works have come to be best-known and most revered outside of Spain. Like them, Machado’s life and works were to shaped by the social and political turmoil that gripped the country in the first half of the century and which were to lead up to the Civil War.

Early Years
Antonio Cipriano José María y Francisco de Santa Ana Machado y Ruiz was born in Seville in 1875. When he was eight his family moved to Madrid, and it was during his formative years in the city that he, along with his brother, Manuel, began to develop a passion for literature.

After graduating from Madrid University, both brothers went to Paris to work as translators. And it was here that Antonio really got to know the works of poets past and present – from Verlaine to Dario – through the city’s vibrant arts scene. He was never to look back, and the life of a poet stretched away before him.

Major Works
His career started humbly enough – with the publication of a poem in the literary magazine Electra in 1901 – but by 1903, he was to publish the extraordinarily composed Soledades. This, in turn, was added to and amended with the publication of Soledades, Galerias, Otras Poemas in 1907.

That year was to be a defining one for the young poet: he accepted a job as a French teacher in Soria, Castile and Leon. And it was here that he met and married the love of his life, Leonor, whose illness and subsequent early death in 1912 was to resonate so strongly in Campos de Castilla (the definitive edition of which was published four years later in 1916 alongside Nuevas Canciones).

Death and Influence
After a lengthy stint in Baeza in Andalucia, Machado returned to Castile and Leon to take up the position of Professor of French at the Segovia Institute. After the outbreak of Civil War in 1936, he moved from Valencia to Barcelona (one Republican stronghold to another); he died, in exile across the French Border, in February 1939.

As a leading member of the so-called Generation of ’98, Machado will always be remembered as one of Spain’s foremost men of letters. His most famous works – while beautiful yet unsettling portrayals of the Castilian landscape – are overwhelmingly preoccupied with the themes of time, death and regeneration provoked by the loss of his young wife.

But it was his preoccupation with the concept of duality – most notably expressed in the famous line from Proverbios y Cantares: “Una España que muere y otra España que bosteza...” (One Spain that yawns, the other that dies...) – that came to symbolise a divided nation.