Guest Author - Rachel L Webb

Antonio Machado is one of the most popular of the Spanish poets. He was born in Campos de Castilla, Seville in 1875, but his family moved to Madrid when he was only eight. While studying for his Bachillerato family finances forced him to work as well. In this time he went to France where he met some contemporary writers who influenced his decision to dedicate his writing to poetry.

He studied literature and French and after his studies he was given a position to teach French in Soria. It was here that he met and fell in love with the daughter of his landlady, who was only fifteen at the time, while he was 34. They married fairly quickly but after a very short marriage his wife, Leonor, contracted tuberculosis and died.

Grief stricken and contemplating suicide he received orders to move to Baeza in Jaen province, Andalucia, where he stayed for seven years. Through this period he frequently shut himself in classrooms and went for long solitary walks around the old city walls of his new hometown.

During this time he lived with his mother in a rented house and gradually began to write again. Although his best and happiest works were written during the short happy years of his marriage - Campos de Castilla, Fields of Castilla is acknowledged as being written in this period.

Some of his early poetry, including Solitudes, Galleries and other poems were influenced by the French modernist movement, and Frederico Garcia Lorca with whom he’d spent some time.

In 1919 Machado moved again to Segovia in Castile, nearer to his brother who was in Madrid. They met at weekends and became popular performing plays they’d written. He stayed in Segovia until 1932 when he was given a post in Madrid, and that was he base when the Civil War started.

Antonio Machado like Lorca was another victim of the Spanish Civil War. He went to Valencia at the beginning of the Civil War in which he supported the Republic. In February, 1939, he fled across the Pyrenees with his mother and her brother, but became ill during the trip and died shortly thereafter in the French town of Collioure.



Antonio Machado’s major publications

Solitudes (1903)
Solitudes, Galleries and other poems (1907)
Fields of Castilla (1912)
Poesías completas (1917)
Nuevas canciones (1924)
Poesías completas (1936, fourth edition)
Juan de Mairena (1936)