Solitudes and Other Early Poems

Machado was born in Seville in 1875; his father was the great compiler of Andalusian folk poetry. Antonio's brother, Manuel, was also destined to become a leading poet. When Antonio was eight, the family moved to Madrid, where their father died not long afterwards. Given their background, their father's interests and the lively literary gatherings frequently held in their home - it was natural that the two brothers should early become interested in writing poetry. They were also interested in art and the theatre (in fact, their first writings were about the theatre and they collaborated in writing a number of plays). Although always bound by affection and respect, they were markedly different in many ways. Manuel was carefree and drawn to the pleasures of life, something of a dandy, delighting in entertainments, flirtations and the bohemian cafe life, happy enough to write a light, undemanding literary journalism. Antonio, on the other hand, was moody and introverted, preoccupied with ideas about life and art, a profound student of philosophy. In 1899 the brothers went to Paris, then the cultural capital of Europe. There they earned a living translating for the publishing house of Garnier while absorbing the poetic methodologies of the various literary schools of the day: Symbolism, Parnassianism and Impressionism. Manuel naturally delighted in the carefree social life which Paris offered, while Antonio, true to his own nature, engaged in a study of the intuitionism of Henri Bergson whose lectures he attended at the French College and whose ideas deeply influenced all his later work. 'Paris (of 1899),' Machado wrote, 'was still the city of the "Dreyfus affair" in the ambience of politics, of symbolism in poetry, of impressionism in painting, of elegant scepticism in criticism.' He met Oscar Wilde and Jean Moreas; and it was in Paris, too, in 1902, that he met the Nicaraguan poet - father of all modern poetry in Spanish - Ruben Dario. In the '20s and '30s Machado spent his time schoolmastering in provincial towns, travelling round Spain and writing his poems. By the time the Civil War took place, his reputation was made. That catastrophe, however, put an end to more than Machado's poetry; it also killed him. Machado, along with the majority of Spanish intellectuals, supported the Republic and the new Spain it was hopefully and painfully ushering in; and he stayed in Spain to the bitter end, despite an offer from England of a lucrative position as a teacher of Spanish Literature. At the fall of Madrid, Antonio, with his mother, his youngest brother Jose and Jose's family, made his way, in the most appalling circumstances and with thousands of other starving and destitute refugees, to the small French border town of Collioure. Neither Antonio nor his old mother survived the terrible journey. Antonio died of pneumonia, and his mother, who was herself dying in another room in the same hotel at the same time without knowledge of her son's illness, followed him within three days. Machado's own modest account of his life up to 1917, to be found in his own prologue to his Collected Poems is as follows: "I was born in Seville one night in July 1875, in the celebrated Palacio de las Duenas, located in the street of the same name. My memories of my native city are those of a child, since at eight I moved with my parents to live in Madrid. There I was educated at the Institucion Libre de Ensenanza - by teachers whom I hold in real affection and for whom I feel deep gratitude. My adolescence and early manhood are Madrilenian. I have travelled somewhat in France and Spain. In 1907 I obtained a post of head of department in the French language which I taught for five years in Soria. There I married: there my wife died, whose memory always goes with me. I moved to Baeza, where I now reside. My pastimes are walking and reading."