Rubén Darío, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Valle-Inclán, Antonio Machado: Spanish Poets

Rubén Darío: The Nicaraguan Poet (1867-1916)

Rubén Darío (1867-1916) was one of the most celebrated and admired poets of his time. His artistic evolution is evident in his three books of poetry:

• Azul (Blue): A work full of youthful enthusiasm.
• Prosas Profanas (Profane Prose): Corresponds to the splendor of the modernist movement and his greatest personal success.
• Cantos de Vida y Esperanza (Songs of Life and Hope): A book that questions the meaning of life and expresses his vital disappointment.

Rubén Darío's poetry was adopted in Spain by young poets of that time.

Juan Ramón Jiménez: Evolution of Spanish Poetry (1881-1958)

The poetic career of Juan Ramón Jiménez, born in Moguer, Huelva in 1881 and died in Puerto Rico in 1958, exemplifies the evolution of Spanish poetry in the first half of the 20th century. In his first books, there are still traces of the formal simplicity and sensitivity of Bécquer. Later, fascinated by Rubén Darío, he publishes The Sonorous Solitude (1908). His poetry then becomes more formally complicated.

However, from 1916, the year he published Diary of a Newly Married Poet, his work changed course: he abandons the modernist style and takes up free verse, while replacing melancholy with an enthusiastic tone with which he expresses a feeling of plenitude. He called this poetry poesía desnuda (naked poetry). Juan Ramón Jiménez received the Nobel Prize in 1956, two years before his death.

Ramón María del Valle-Inclán: Playwright of the Generation of '98 (1866-1936)

Born in Villanueva de Arosa, Pontevedra in 1866 and died in Santiago de Compostela, La Coruña in 1936, Ramón María del Valle-Inclán is not only the most important playwright of the Generation of '98, but also one of the most relevant of the twentieth century, although not fully understood in his time, and most of his works were not performed until after his death. The first published works by Valle-Inclán in the early years are of the modernist genre and narrative style.

It is in the 1920s when his work culminates with the dramatic creation of a type of play called grotesques, which ridicules both Spanish society and human nature itself.

Antonio Machado: From Modernism to Castile (1875-1939)

Born in Seville in 1875 and died in Collioure, France in 1939, Antonio Machado has two stages in his poetry: he published Soledades (Solitudes), his first book of poems, in the modernist aesthetic. Years later he expanded it and published it with the title of Soledades, Galerías y Otros Poemas (Solitudes, Galleries and Other Poems). In 1907 he moved from Madrid to Soria, where he wrote Campos de Castilla (Fields of Castile), a work leaving Modernism and, following the noventayochista trend, writes about the beauty and the depth of the landscape and the people of Castile, in a simple, almost conversational at times, deeply poetic style. After the death of Eleanor, his wife, he left Soria and wrote prose as he gave life to an apocryphal.