Antonio Machado: Life and Poetic Works

Antonio Machado

Early Life and Education

Antonio Machado was born in Seville in 1875. He came from a learned, liberal family that moved to Madrid in 1883. He studied at the Free Institution of Education. His secular, progressive, and tolerant spirit forever marked his character. In 1907, he obtained a full professorship of French at the Institute of Soria, and there he met Leonor Izquierdo, whom he married in 1909. In 1911, he traveled to Paris and attended philosophy classes by the admired Henri Bergson. When his wife fell ill, he returned to Soria. She died in 1912, and he moved to Baeza, deeply hurt.

Career and Relationships

He continued to publish poetry, studied philosophy, and developed a radical political consciousness in contact with the miserable reality of Andalusia. In late 1919, he moved to the Institute of Segovia. In 1928, he met Pilar Valderrama, with whom he maintained a secret love affair and whom he poetically named Guiomar. In 1931, he helped raise the Republican banner in the city of Segovia, and the following year he moved to Madrid.

Civil War and Exile

During the Civil War, he took sides with the Republican cause. Since late 1936, he lived in the Valencian village of Rocafort until 1938, when he was evacuated to Barcelona, where he continued to write in favor of the Republic. Seriously ill, he went into exile in January 1939, and on February 22, he died in France.

Poetic Production

In 1903, he published his first book, Soledades, which was reissued with amendments in 1907 under the name of Soledades. Galerías. Otros poemas. In 1912, Campos de Castilla appeared. His latest book of poems is called Nuevas canciones, edited in 1924. Successive editions of his Complete Poems were published, which included new poems. In the latest edition, the poems are grouped into four parts: Soledades, Campos de Castilla, Nuevas canciones, and Cancionero apócrifo. A fifth group should be added, which are the poems written during the Civil War.

Soledades, Galerías, Otros poemas

This work appears in the heyday of modernism. It is filled with melancholy and suffering. The themes are: love, time, loneliness, lost childhood, and dreams. Machado aims to capture in his poetry what he calls universal feeling. He uses symbols to convey the mystery of the hidden (path, mirror, crystal, labyrinth, spring, river, sea, garden, late autumn). Their meanings are different and sometimes change, even in the same text. For example, the spring and flowing water are symbols of dreams but, in some cases, also signify the monotony of life.

In the second edition of 1907, superficially modernist poems were deleted, and many new ones were added. It emphasizes the intimate line. Recollection, memory, and sleep evoke the lost past. New symbols are incorporated, like the galleries of the soul, to suggest the inside of consciousness. There is a feeling of anxiety about the passage of time and the coming of death. In some poems, the figure of God also appears, lacking rational but vitally desirable. External reality is imbued with the poet's emotional state.