Antonio Machado, the luminous and profound poet who worshipped universal values
150 years ago, on July 26, 1875, Antonio Cipriano José María Machado Ruiz was born in Seville. In the universal history of literature, Antonio Machado , simply put, was born. A humanist, bohemian, generous, anti-Franco, and committed ("Consciousness precedes the alphabet and bread," he maintained), he was declared a "poet of universal values" by UNESCO in 1989. He paid, like no other, the finest tribute to the Castilian landscape in one of his major works, Campos de Castilla (Fields of Castile ), from 1912, praised by Miguel de Unamuno , José Ortega y Gasset, and Azorín.
A poet with romantic roots, he defined his early poems as "written rhymes," alluding to Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer. However, he aspired to the simplicity of an "anti-rhetorical classicism." " Am I classic or romantic? I don't know. I would like to lay down / my verse, as a captain lays down his sword : / famous for the virile hand that wielded it, / not prized by the learned craft of the forger," he states in the poem "Portrait." Machado's poetics harmonizes dissimilar currents such as Greco-Latin Antiquity, traditional Spanish lyric poetry, and French Symbolism.
“'He was luminous and profound,' as Rubén Darío said of him; the most admirable and beloved poet in Spanish literature of his time and ours , because Antonio Machado is an essential, timeless, eternal poet,” writer and academic Antonio Requeni summarizes to LA NACION.
He became a poet through experience. “ Poetry is a dialogue between man and time ,” he maintained. His family, educated and progressive, lived in a rented house in the Seville palace of Las Dueñas. His father was a doctor of literature and a lawyer; his paternal grandfather was a professor of natural sciences and rector of the University of Seville. “ My childhood is memories of a Sevillian patio / and a bright orchard, where the lemon tree ripens ; / my youth, twenty years in the land of Castile; / my history, some events I don't want to remember,” the poet recalled.
In 1883, when he was eight years old, his family settled in Madrid. He studied at the Free Institution of Education (ILE). “I attended high school and university, but all I have left of these institutions is a great aversion to anything academic ,” he later recalled. However, he dedicated a heartfelt poem to the educator Francisco Giner de los Ríos, founder of the ILE, and worked as a French teacher.
With his brother Manuel, a year older and just as passionate about the theater, he participated in Madrid's bohemian life at the end of the 19th century. He formed relationships with figures such as Ramón del Valle-Inclán, the actress and businesswoman María Guerrero , and the actor and businessman Fernando Díaz de Mendoza. They later moved to Paris, where they met the writer Pío Baroja, the Symbolist poets, and even Oscar Wilde. Back in Spain, he met the "leaders" of modernism—the Spaniards Francisco Villaespesa and Juan Ramón Jiménez, his great friend, and the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío ("he brings us the gold of his divine word," he would write)—and began collaborating with literary magazines. In 1903, he published his first book, Soledades , which he would expand over the years .
As a teacher in Soria, he fell in love with Leonor Izquierdo, whom he married when she was fifteen and he was 34. The romance - which included a study trip to Paris, where Machado studied with the philosopher Henri Bergson - ended with Leonor's premature death in 1912, the same year that Campos de Castilla was published.
After leaving Soria (he would return years later, when he was named an adopted son of the city), he dedicated himself to teaching in Baeza, where he met Federico García Lorca. The success of Campos de Castilla , he would tell Juan Ramón Jiménez, prevented him from taking his own life due to the sadness caused by his wife's death , which would affect his writing.
“In 2023, I visited Baeza,” says writer and academic María Rosa Lojo . “I was in the austere classrooms where Antonio Machado taught. I saw his clear handwriting and his signature, also clear, like his poetry, under the light of a glass case . I thought that with those letters he had written his Soledades and his Galerías , his Nuevas canciones , his cielos and his campos. Then, in the cathedral, I greeted Saint Christopher, carrying the Child Jesus on his shoulders: the same one who in one of his verses wants to scare away the owl when he drinks from the Virgin's oil candle, but she stops him. I thought of that man who didn't boast of being a hero, or a teacher, or a wise man, or even a poet. The one who preferred to portray himself this way: 'I am, in the good sense of the word, good.' The one who left 'light of baggage / almost naked, like the children of the sea.' The one I recite by heart, with my heart, because that's where I carry him. tattooed, in my very brief universal anthology of the indelible and the endearing.”
The Irish historian Ian Gibson published the biography Light of Luggage , which was also published in comic book format, with illustrations by the Spaniard Quique Palomo.
From the 1920s onward, he enjoyed well-deserved prestige. In 1925, he was named a corresponding member of the Hispanic Society of America; in 1926, he premiered plays he had written with his brother Manuel, a collaboration that lasted until 1932. And in 1927, he was appointed a full member of the Royal Spanish Academy, although he was unable to take possession of the fifth chair. In 1931, he was transferred from Segovia to the Calderón de la Barca Institute in Madrid. That same year, Manuel and Antonio were named favorite sons of the city of Seville.
" Machado is the poet who, in every verse, reminds us that we belong to a place, that we carry a landscape and that our fortunes and misfortunes are those of all men: love, loss, the recovery of the past, the fleetingness of the moment -says the writer Rafael Felipe Oteriño , president of the Argentine Academy of Letters-. When in 1927 he was elected by the Royal Spanish Academy to form part of the institution, his entry was delayed until death overtook him in Colliure on February 22, 1939. But after eighty-six years, on April 29, the RAE paid tribute to him: the actor José Sacristán read the speech that the poet had prepared for his public reception. He speaks to us of a new sentimentality, of the essential heterogeneity of being. Of time and its paradoxes, of freedom and fraternity” .
Machado's heart was given a second chance when he began a romance in Madrid with Pilar de Valderrama , a lady of the upper bourgeoisie, married and mother of three children as well as a poetic muse, whom he renamed Guiomar.
In 1936, Juan de Mairena. Sentencias, witticisms, apuntes y recuerdos de un profesor apócrifo (Juan de Mairena. Sentencias, wit, apuntes y recuerdos de un profesor apócrifo) was published , an extraordinary mixed-genre “philosophical diary” and one of Machado’s central books . In it, a free-thinking professor—Mairena, one of Machado’s heteronyms—reflects with wit on society, culture, art, literature, education, women, politics, and philosophy with erudition and irony. “ After truth, there is nothing as beautiful as fiction. The great poets are failed metaphysicians. The great philosophers are poets who believe in the reality of their poems,” Mairena believes. The other heteronym was Abel Martín, a Sevillian and professor (like Machado). Guillermo de Torre published Los complementarias (The Complementary Ones), a posthumous compilation of Mairena’s writings, with the Losada publishing house.
He was a member of the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals and, at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, he published articles in newspapers and magazines opposing the Francoist uprising (among them, "The Crime Was in Granada," an elegy to García Lorca). "La guerra ," with drawings by his brother José, was the last book he published during his lifetime . His friends León Felipe and Rafael Alberti advised him to leave Madrid for Rocafort, Valencia; Machado left the Spanish capital—never to return—in November 1936.
In March 1938, he moved to Barcelona, and in January 1939, faced with the advance of Franco's troops, he and his family began exile to Collioure, France, in poor health. Machado, who had lost his luggage and writings (including some of his correspondence) at the border, died on February 22, 1939, at the age of 63. His mother, Ana Ruiz, died three days later. Both are buried in the small maritime cemetery in Collioure.
Popularized by Joan Manuel Serrat, Alberto Cortez, and Paco Ibáñez, among other artists, Machado's work— which had been censored and "reinterpreted" in the early years of Franco's regime (the head of the National Propaganda Service called the poet "nefarious") —never lost its relevance.
The Antonio Machado International Sesquicentennial Congress was held in Soria on Wednesday and Thursday. On the 24th, the Spanish Ministry of Culture held a tribute to mark the 150th anniversary of the writer's birth. " Machado was a poet with a civic mission, a staunch defender of the Republic, of education, and of culture ; a free man whose verses grow from the pure spring of the people and who, wherever he went, stood up to fascism," said Spanish Minister of Culture Ernest Urtasun. The literary map Antonio Machado: Light of Luggage was also presented, tracing the author's life through the places in Spain and France that shaped his life and literature.
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