Antonio Machado: Poetics and Analysis of His Works
Poetics
Back in 1912, the portrait gives us fundamental data. It can be debatable, due to passion or vehemence, that sometimes appears in his verses. In their stance before Modernism and the aesthetic, they reject pure poetry conceived as such. By contrast, full acceptance of poetry has its root in the cordial, the human: “The universal feeling.” Independence from fashion, or defense of labels, and obedience to the compromised poetry of poetry itself, and with it, the poetic reality. Machado has a double root: Late Romanticism and Symbolism.
In his first trip to Paris, he met the Symbolists and was influenced by them. Rubén Darío’s footprint, as well as that of the Modernists, is evident in some poems of Solitudes. The discarded ideas and accentuated feelings of Machado’s Symbolism are not clear. Perhaps their influence is more of a romantic and Bécquerian dream of Machado. The romantic dissatisfaction appears in Solitude. For Machado, by 1931, poetry is the dialogue of a man with his time; therefore, the season is essential to Machado’s poetry. Against rhetoric and the overvaluation of the senses, he prefers direct insights. Behind the appearance of plain and direct language, there is an entire complex and interwoven symbolic world, not easy to interpret: symbols, intuitive images, adverbs of time, references to death, verbal forms of durative aspect, and rhyme.
Analysis of His Works
Solitudes, Galleries, and Other Poems
This work can be interpreted as a search for the authentic self, ending in frustration, although not failure. The themes revolve around time and the flow of human life, death that is there, and the problem of God (the central questions of the human condition, given a life with suffering and chance). These core issues enshrine, as well: lost childhood, dreams and hopes, and love. A love that seems more dreamed than done, a lost love, and dead feelings. The gloomy tone that dominates the book is the feeling of loneliness and the emptiness of living. There is melancholy. The symbols include the path. The garden represents intimacy, and water is a very important symbol of hopes and dreams. On the other hand, there are two Manriquean symbols: the river, symbolizing the flow of life towards death, symbolized by the sea.
Meter
The most used stanza is the assonant *silva*, and all are octosyllabic.
Fields of Castile
There is a new approach in Machado, who exhibits less of his ego, and his personal problems or desires, and focuses more on the landscapes of Castile, its men, and Spain. In Fields of Castile, there will be a lyrical vision, and an excited, critical vision. In “Through the Lands of Spain,” the poet witnesses a series of decadence in Castile. Machado does not address the historical and social causes of such a state of affairs. It will be in Andalusia, where he sees the greatest examples of social inequality. Proof of this will be the poems “Of the Ephemeral Past,” where criticism appears mordant. In these poems, he will measure the present, past, and future of Spain. All these issues are in the position of regeneration and the Generation of ’98.
But in Baeza, he also writes poems about Leonor’s death. And from 1917, he wrote poems of a philosophical-moral nature: Proverbs and Songs, poetic parables of unequal quality. Likewise, reflective lyricism dominates over the descriptive. And in 1942, he published New Songs, where Machado himself confesses to a creative crisis.