Antonio Machado and Ramón del Valle-Inclán: Life and Works
Antonio Machado (1875-1939)
Antonio Machado was born in Seville into a liberal and progressive bourgeois family. He studied at the Free Institution of Education. He traveled to Paris, where he met Henri Bergson and Rubén Darío. He won the French chair at the Institute of Soria. He married Leonor Izquierdo, who died suddenly; her memory remained in his life and work. After living in Baeza (Jaén), Segovia, and Madrid, he met Pilar Valderrama, “Guiomar” of his poems, his late love. In 1927, he was elected a member of the Royal Spanish Academy. Loyal and committed to the Republic, he went into exile shortly before the war ended. He died in Collioure, a village in southern France near the border, where he is buried.
Project
Antonio Machado is the most important poet of the Generation of 98 and one of the best in Spanish poetry. His poetry is characterized by profound humanism and fraternity, with a clear dominance of life over art. Its main themes are personal identity and destiny, time, sleep, love, landscape, the decline of Spain, and the hope for a better future.
His Poetic Career
His poetic career is divided into three stages, represented by three main books:
- Solitudes, Galleries, and Other Poems: Poetry of modernist influence, in which the author delves into the “gallery” of his soul to understand the riddles of existence and his inner world. The poet establishes correspondences between the elements of nature and his state of mind through symbols: water (“running time”, “life”), the path (“life as a quest”), air (“freedom”), land (“solitude”), fire (“love”), afternoon (“melancholy, nostalgia”), the mirror (“memories, dreams”).
- Campos de Castilla: Alternates poems dedicated to the memory of Leonor with the evocation of the land of Castile.
- New Songs: These poems will dominate reflective lyricism. They are short poems and sentences in which Machado expresses thoughts in poetic form.
Prose Work
In his prose work, the book Juan de Mairena stands out. It is a work where the writer hides behind a fictional teacher, who is giving his ideas on various topics.
Ramón María del Valle-Inclán (1866-1936)
Ramón María del Valle-Inclán was born in Villanueva de Arosa (Pontevedra). In 1892, he moved to Mexico and returned the following year. In Madrid, he frequented literary circles and was known for his extravagant appearance and wit. He merged life and literature: he made up stories about his life, becoming a literary character. Concerned by the Spanish social and political reality, he showed an anti-bourgeois and leftist ideology. He died in Santiago de Compostela.
Work
The most outstanding literary genres in the work of Valle-Inclán are the novel, poetry, and, above all, theater. Valle-Inclán is the best playwright and one of the innovators of contemporary theater. The main feature of his work is the poetry of reality, either idealizing or degrading it. We distinguish two stages:
- Modernist Stage: His most representative work is the Sonatas, a set of four books that tell the amorous adventures of the protagonist in different decadent and refined environments, with evocative descriptions characterized by sensory values and rhythmic effects.
- Grotesque Stage: The author caricatures his characters, showing a ridiculous, absurd, or cruel picture, more “dehumanized.” The absurdity is a means to denounce, through literary aesthetic satire, the defects in humans and Spain: corruption, injustice, despotism, hypocrisy, etc. Therefore, they are works of aesthetic, but also social dimension.
Between the modernist and grotesque stages is a period of transition, in which he publishes works that mix the epic with the mythical, with characters living in a violent environment, dominated by brutality and lust.