Antonio Machado’s Poetry and Art Nouveau in Literature
Poetry of Antonio Machado
Solitudes, Galleries, and Other Poems
This work shows the influence of Verlaine: gloomy gardens and melancholy autumn sunsets.
The topics of Solitudes are the passage of time, lost youth, and dreams. In general, reactions are expressed with lyrical nature and the problem of death. Everything is closely related to the tempus fugit.
Solitudes is characteristic of the way of dialogue with nature (the personification of the dawn of the seasons) and the lyrical.
Machado’s symbols are: the late (symbol of the decline of the lyrical), water (symbolizing life), the source (symbolizing the flow), the garden (symbolizing youth), and the path (symbolizing the highway). The galleries of the soul are the most important symbol of Machado.
Campos de Castilla (1912, 1917)
It has a more direct referentiality than symbolism, although everything looks at the landscape, men, and history. The fundamental issue is the decline of Spain and the Spanish character. It also includes the “Proverbs and Songs”, “Parables”, poems dedicated to Eleanor, and the long romance “The Land of Alvargonzález”.
Later Production
New Songs (1924), Songs to Guiomar, Poems of the War.
Metrics and Expressive Resources
Solitudes used traditional forms such as the silva-romance. In Campos de Castilla, free verse appears.
Art Nouveau: General Features
It is a literary movement that emerged in Latin America in the late nineteenth century. It arises from the crisis of positivism and reason (exhaustion of realism and naturalism).
Hispanic American modernism was born from Spanish modernism, which in turn draws on the sources of symbolism and French Parnassianism (Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Baudelaire). Parnassianism is art for art’s sake, and symbolism refers to poetry as an instrument of knowledge.
We must emphasize Latin American authors such as Rubén Darío and José Martí. The movement in Spain was fleeting but had great importance in later literature.
Main Features:
- Search for originality that sometimes borders on extravagance. The artist rebels against society, protests against the bourgeoisie, and bears resemblance to the romantic in this regard.
- A taste for the past, as in Romanticism. A return to the Middle Ages and classical antiquity, and a taste for the decadent past.
- In the decadent sample, there is indulgence in the dim and dilapidated, and also a taste for human misery, disease, and death.
- Pain is a central issue. Both thought and reflection lead to pain; the individual becomes aware of his finitude, and the characters in the works tend to avoid suffering.
- They have a life-weariness, the evil of the century, such as skepticism, pessimism, dissatisfaction, distrust of rulers, and melancholy.
- A taste for delicate love, but also overwhelmed by sensuality, and it can even reach the obscene, the demonic, and evil.
- A taste for the exotic: Asian civilizations, Muslim and ancient cultures.
- They defended cosmopolitanism. A taste for travel, meeting people and places. Paris, with its cabarets and neighborhoods, became an artistic goal and theme. Sometimes cosmopolitanism is combined with the exaltation of the popular.
Its Best Representative is Rubén Darío
Azul
Azul was published in 1888 and includes short stories and poems. The book creates a world of princesses, swans, centaurs, etc. The lexicon is filled with exotic objects and aristocratic delicacy. This book also makes full use of symbols.
Profane Prose
Continuing the aristocratic avoidance line, and secondly, there is also a social concern.
Songs of Life and Hope
His new role will be to address political affairs and leave his “ivory tower”.
Construction Characteristics of Spanish Modernism:
- Manuel Machado: Alma
- Juan Ramón Jiménez: Sad Arias and Distant Gardens
- Antonio Machado: Solitudes
- Stylistic Features:
- Search for suggestion
- Plasticity: color effects (blue, violet, maroon, etc.), sound effects.
- Sensation language: effects of light, color, and music.