Antonio Machado, Valle-Inclán, and Juan Ramón Jiménez
Antonio Machado
Born in Seville in 1875, Antonio Machado moved to Madrid, where he studied at the Institución Libre de Enseñanza. He became a professor of French at the Institute of Soria. He lived in Paris, where he encountered the Symbolist literary world. A proponent of the legal government of the Popular Front and a supporter of the Republic, he died in Collioure.
The Work of Antonio Machado
The first stage encompasses feelings of modernist grief. Melancholy and loneliness appear, and Romantic influences and Symbolist dissatisfaction are present. This stage longs for the past and childhood, with symbols such as the road representing life. His style is simple and varied, but the meter is assonant.
Campos de Castilla
From across Castile, the Soria landscape appears, allowing for a double reading: the referential (denotative) describes the landscape as it is, and the intimate (connotative) conveys feelings experienced in these landscapes.
His poetry evolved into more philosophical themes presented in popular forms like ballads and couplets, and metaphysical subjects, such as time, in Canciones a Guiomar.
Juan de Mairena
Juan de Mairena presents prose reflections of this gym teacher.
Ramón María del Valle-Inclán
Ramón María del Valle-Inclán was born in Villanueva de Arosa in 1866. He began a law career, which he neglected to live in Madrid and later in Mexico, where he encountered Modernism. He strongly criticized the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and was imprisoned in 1929. He was a Professor of Aesthetics and Director of the Spanish Academy in Rome. He died in 1936.
Narrative
The Sonatas represent the pinnacle of musical and sensual Modernist prose. Its protagonist, the Marquis of Bradomín, tells of four sentimental adventures in biographical form that coincide with the four stages of life. The trilogy The Carlist War depicts the harshness of war, followed by Tirano Banderas. The Iberian Circle harshly caricatures the court of Elizabeth II.
Theater
Valle-Inclán’s theater is divided into cycles. It begins with the Modernist cycle, simultaneously focusing on the mythic cycle in a rural, ancestral Galicia with characters exhibiting violent passions. This continues with the cycle of farces, comedies grouped on the stage of puppets for the education of princes, leading to the grotesque cycle, and drifting toward a final puppet cycle.
The Scarecrow
The Scarecrow represents a new aesthetic worldview characterized by a distortion of reality, developed in Valle-Inclán’s theater (Bohemian Lights), novels (Tirano Banderas, The Iberian Circle), and poetry (The Kif Pipe).
The features that appear in Bohemian Lights will remain with little variation in all his grotesque works: parody and reality training that does not preclude recognizing the characters; humorization and objectification of characters and objects; a language with mixed levels; absolute moral, political, and social criticism; urban scenes; and cinematic simultaneity. The stage directions are true Modernist literary texts.
Juan Ramón Jiménez
Juan Ramón Jiménez dedicated himself fully to poetry, giving unity to his work through selected anthologies of his poems. In them, we see the three stages of his evolution: Modernist, intellectual, and true. Influenced by Bécquer and Symbolism, Juan Ramón struggled to find the language and words appropriate to his experience during the Modernist stage. The intellectual stage began in 1916 when the poet traveled by boat to the U.S. to marry. In Diario de un reciencasado, the sea symbolizes loneliness, eternity, wholeness, and life—elements with which he identifies. He dispels musicality and uses free verse in an attempt to capture the essence of things. It is an abstract, refined, and intelligent poetry. The last stage, the “true” stage, is a pantheistic one where the poet identifies God in nature. He married a very intelligent woman named Zenobia Camprubí.