‘¡Yunques sonad; enmudeced campanas!’: Antonio Machado and the Forging of a Poetic Conscience of the Race^*

* The words quoted in my title come from Antonio Machado’s elegy ‘A don Francisco Giner de los Ríos’, Campos de Castilla. See Antonio Machado, Poesía y prosa, ed. crítica de Oreste Macrì con la colaboración de Gaetano Chiappini, 4 vols (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe/Fundación Antonio Machado, 1989), II, Poesías completas, CXXXIX, 587–88. All quotations from Machado’s poetry refer to this edition.

Abstract

Antonio Machado’s creative evolution from an examination of self-consciousness in Soledades, Galerías y otros poemas (1902–1907) to the forging of a poetic conscience of his race in Campos de Castilla (1912–1917) was the result of a crisis of artistic conscience (1903–1904) in the aftermath of the national crisis of the 1898 Disaster, a continual point of reference for the poet. The rejection of pure art for committed social art was in response to the call of the prose writers of his generation to join in the collective task of national moral and political rearmament, creating a new secular heterodox Spain in opposition to traditional orthodox Spain. The poetic expression of Machado’s national social conscience was informed by observation of life in Soria and Baeza and by a cultural imagination that assimilated in a poetic dialogue the collective vision and commonplaces of his literary tribe—Unamuno, Azorín, Baroja and Ortega y Gasset. It was a Republican conscience inherited from his father ‘Demófilo’ and the Institución Libre de Enseñanza; assimilating ideas from (Christian) Anarchism and Socialism, its expression became increasingly revolutionary. He was to be the fore-runner of the committed poets of the thirties whom he would join in the cultural war-effort of the Second Republic in defence of that conscience.

Key words:

• Early 20^th-century Spanish poetry
• Generation of 1898
• Antonio Machado
• Miguel de Unamuno
• Azorín
• Pío Baroja
• Spain’s Second Republic
• Institución Libre de Enseñanza
• pure art
• social art
• Christian Anarchism

Notes

* The words quoted in my title come from Antonio Machado’s elegy ‘A don Francisco Giner de los Ríos’, Campos de Castilla. See Antonio Machado, Poesía y prosa, ed. crítica de Oreste Macrì con la colaboración de Gaetano Chiappini, 4 vols (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe/Fundación Antonio Machado, 1989), II, Poesías completas, CXXXIX, 587–88. All quotations from Machado’s poetry refer to this edition.

1 Quoted by Miguel de Unamuno, ‘Almas de jóvenes’, in his Obras completas, prólogo, ed. & notas de Manuel García Blanco, 15 vols (Madrid: Afrodisio Aguado, 1950–1963), III (1955), 718–36.

2 James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man (1916) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964), 253.

3 H. Taine, ‘Introduction’, in Histoire de la littérature anglaise, 5 vols (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1905–1911 [1^e ed. 1863–1864]), I (1905), xxii.

4 Rafael Altamira, Psicología del pueblo español (Barcelona: Editorial Minerva, 1917 [1ª ed. Madrid: F. Fe, 1902]), 55.

5 Machado, Poesía y prosa, ed. Macrì, III, Prosas completas (1893–1936), 1458.

6 Helios, año I (1903), tomo II, 520.

7 Reproduced by Geoffrey Ribbans, ‘Unamuno y Antonio Machado’, in his Niebla y soledad: aspectos de Unamuno y Machado (Madrid: Gredos, 1971), 289–92.

8 Antonio Machado, Prosas dispersas (1893–1936), ed. Jordi Doménech, intro. de Rafael Alarcón Sierra (Madrid: Páginas de Espuma, 2001), 175–80 (p. 178).

9 See Geoffrey Ribbans, ‘Unamuno y “Los jóvenes” en 1904’, in Ribbans, Niebla y soledad, 45–82.

10 S.XIX, ‘Poesías sueltas’, in Machado, Poesía y prosa, ed. Macrì, II, Poesías completas, 754. (Poem numbers and page numbers subsequently given in text refer to this volume.)

11 Machado, Poesía y prosa, ed. Macrì, III, Prosas completas (1893–1936), 1469; Machado, Prosas dispersas, ed. Doménech, 190.

12 Helios, V (August 1903), año I, tomo II, 92.

13 In the same issue of Alma Española he published a ‘gacetilla’, ‘Trabajando para el porvenir’, a return to the early social satires in La Caricatura (1893), an ironic meditation on a future regeneration by the Jesuits, building a seminary in Madrid ‘como expresión final de una raza’.

14 José Ortega y Gasset, ‘Los versos de Antonio Machado’ (July 1912), in José Ortega y Gasset, Obras completas, 12 vols (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1946–1983), I, 1902–1916, 563–67.

15 Ortega y Gasset, Obras completas, I, 48–53 (p. 52).

16 Ortega y Gasset, Obras completas, I, 53–57 (p. 56).

17 Machado, Prosas dispersas, ed. Doménech, 325–29 (p. 326).

18 Published in El Liberal, 5 March 1913, and in El Porvenir Castellano, 10 March 1913. See Machado, Poesía y prosa, ed. Macrì, III, Prosas completas (1893–1936), 1526–29 (p. 1529).

19 Machado, Poesía y prosa, ed. Macrì, III, Prosas completas (1893–1936), 1508–11 (p. 1509).

20 Aurora de Albornoz, La presencia de Miguel de Unamuno en Antonio Machado (Madrid: Gredos, 1967), 57, 93, 102.

21 Unamuno, Obras completas, ed. García Blanco, III, 99 and 104. The essays of 1895 were published as a book in 1901.

22 Unamuno, Obras completas, ed. García Blanco, III, 37.

23 Machado always included Joaquín Costa in a trinity with Giner and Unamuno; Costa's Oligarquía y caciquismo (1902) and ‘Política hidráulica’ are important ideological sources.

24 Pío Baroja, Escritos de juventud (1890–1904), prólogo & selección de Manuel Longares (Madrid: EDICUSA, 1972), 129–33.

25 Azorín, ‘Los pueblos’; ‘La Andalucía trágica’ y otros artículos (1904–1905), ed., intro. & notas de José María Valverde (Madrid: Castalia, [1973]), 45.

26 Azorín, La ruta de don Quijote, ed., with intro., notes & a critical study by H. Ramsden (Manchester: Manchester U. P., 1966), 31–32.

27 Baroja, Escritos de juventud (1890–1904), selección de Longares, 137.

28 Prose version reproduced in Campos de Castilla (1907–1917), ed., con intro., de Geoffrey Ribbans (Madrid: Cátedra, 1989), 286–95 (pp. 287 & 292).

29 Machado, Prosas dispersas, ed. Doménech, 338–44. José María Varela, in his ‘Antonio Machado ante España’, in Curso en homenaje a Antonio Machado (Salamanca, otoño 1975) (Salamanca: Univ. de Salamanca, 1977), 272–96, identified 1913 as the decisive year in his politicization and its reflection in verse.

30 Machado, Poesía y prosa, ed. Macrì, III, Prosas completas (1893–1936), 1509.

31 A similar crime overheard in the frame story of La tierra de Alvargonzález was based on a factual crime which took place in Soria in July 1910.

32 Machado, ‘Hombres de España (del pasado superfluo)’, in El Porvenir Castellano, 6 March 1913. For tertulia chat, see Azorín, La ruta de don Quijote, ed. Ramsden, 15–16, 16–17, and compare Machado, ‘Poema de un día’ (CXXVIII, 563–65).

33 Ortega y Gasset, Obras completas, I, 265–308. Machado’s elegy for Giner and Jiménez’s Elegía pura were published in España (1915); the prose elegy was published in an allied journal Nueva Idea (Baeza), 23 February 1915 and republished in El Porvenir Castellano (Soria), 2 March 1915.

34 Ortega y Gasset, Obras completas, I, 268.

35 Machado, Poesía y prosa, ed. Macrì, III, Prosas completas (1893–1936), 1777–98.

36 La Gaceta Literaria, 70, 15 September 1929, published a review of La Lola se va a los puertos beside Jaime Ibarra’s ‘James Joyce’ (on Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man).

37 Machado, Poesía y prosa, ed. Macrì, III, Prosas completas (1893–1936), 1796. Nicolás Fernández-Medina, The Poetics of Otherness in Antonio Machado’s ‘Proverbios y cantares’ (Cardiff: Univ. of Wales Press, 2011), studies the poetic evolution into the popular forms.

38 See James Whiston, Antonio Machado’s Writings and the Spanish Civil War (Liverpool: Liverpool U. P., 1996).

39 Antonio Machado et al., Poetas en la España leal (Madrid/Valencia: Ediciones Españolas, 1937).

* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.