Antonio Machado’s ‘Late Style’

Abstract

This essay departs from the notion of the journey as an image of the poet's career in the poetry of Antonio Machado. This journey implies a process that is, for the most part, reactive rather than evolutionary, notably as in Campos de Castilla. The principal focus, however, is with a less readily explicable feature relating to the poetry that Machado wrote in the period of the Second Republic, specifically in his Cancionero apócrifo. The acknowledged difficulties of these poems and their tendency to fragmentation are considered by reference to what Edward Said, following Theodor Adorno, has termed ‘late style’, which he discerns in a wide range of artists, including Beethoven, Mann, Genet, Visconti and Glenn Gould. To highlight the distinctiveness of Machado’s kinship with these figures a contrast is established between the Spanish poet and the late poetry of his near-contemporary, W. B. Yeats.

Key Words:

• Antonio Machado
• Edward Said
• Theodor Adorno
• W. B. Yeats
• ‘late style’

Notes

1 Antonio Machado, ‘El tren’, in Poesía y prosa, ed. Oreste Macrí con la colaboración de Gaetano Chiappini, 4 vols (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe/Fundación Antonio Machado, 1989), II, Poesías completas, 509. All references are to this edition.

2 In the prologue to the edition of his poetry entitled Páginas escogidas (Madrid: Calleja, 1917) Machado refers variously to ‘lo esencial castellano’, ‘una preocupación patriótica’, ‘[e]l simple amor a la Naturaleza’ and ‘las enigmas del hombre y del mundo’. The only poem he cites specifically is La tierra de Alvargonzález, which he describes as ‘un nuevo Romancero’, a set of romances which ‘miran a lo elemental humano, al campo de Castilla y al libro primero de Moisés, llamado Génesis’ (see Antonio Machado, Campos de Castilla, ed., con intro. & notas, de Geoffrey Ribbans [Madrid: Cátedra, 1989], 274–75).

3 This issue is discussed by D. Gareth Walters, ‘The Painful Gift: Critical Phases in the Poetry of Machado, Lorca and Espriu’, Hispanic Research Journal, 9 (2008), 326–38 (p. 330).

4 For a detailed and measured account of this relationship, see Ian Gibson, Ligero de equipaje: la vida de Antonio Machado (Madrid: Aguilar, 2006), 417–92.

5 D. Gareth Walters, ‘Guiomar: The Nostalgic Vision’, in ‘Estelas en la mar’: Essays on the Poetry of Antonio Machado (1875–1939), ed. D. Gareth Walters (Glasgow: Univ. of Glasgow Dept of Hispanic Studies, 1992), 116–25.

6 Antonio Sánchez Barbudo, Los poemas de Antonio Machado: los temas, el sentimiento y la expresión (Barcelona: Lumen, 1967), 428.

7 José María Valverde, ‘Introducción biográfica y crítica’, to Antonio Machado, ‘Nuevas canciones’ y ‘De un cancionero apócrifo’, ed., intro. & notas de José María Valverde (Madrid: Castalia, 1971), 7–94 (p. 85).

8 Valverde, ‘Introducción’, in Machado, Nuevas canciones, ed. Valverde, 92.

9 Valverde, ‘Introducción’, in Machado, Nuevas canciones, ed. Valverde, 93.

10 Edward Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain, foreword Mariam C. Said, intro. by Michael Wood (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 6.

11 Said, On Late Style, 7.

12 Said, On Late Style, 7; italics in original.

13 Said, On Late Style, 16.

14 Valverde, ‘Introducción’, in Machado, Nuevas canciones, ed. Valverde, 85.

15 See D. Gareth Walters, ‘Re-Writing the Sonnet: The Variant, Deviant and “Discovered” Sonnets of Antonio Machado’, Tesserae, 1 (1995), 151–70 (p. 161).

16 Sánchez Barbudo, however, considers that this section ‘tiene muy poco valor’ (Los poemas de Antonio Machado, 430)—another instance of how Machado's later poetry is generally misunderstood and undervalued.

17 W. B. Yeats, The Poems. A New Edition, ed., with a preface, by Richard J. Finneran (London: Macmillan, 1984), 348. All references are to this edition.

18 See Curtis Bradford, ‘On Yeats's Last Poems’, in Yeats: Last Poems, ed. Jon Stallworthy (London: Macmillan, 1968), 75–97 (p. 75).

19 Said, On Late Style, 11.

20 Said, On Late Style, 11.

21 Said, On Late Style, 12.

22 See O. N. V. Glendinning, ‘The Philosophy of Henri Bergson in the Poetry of Antonio Machado’, Revue de Littérature Comparée, 36 (1962), 50–70.

23 The Adorno Reader, ed. & intro. by Brian O’Connor (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 75.

24 A classic instance in the performing arts is that of Glenn Gould who withdrew from the concert platform at a relatively young age, and thereafter confined his career to the recording studio (Said, On Late Style, 115–33).

25 Sánchez Barbudo, Los poemas de Antonio Machado, 436.

26 Said, On Late Style, 12.

27 Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (London: Macmillan, 1995), 30.

28 Said, On Late Style, 13.

29 Said, On Late Style, 24.

30 See Sánchez Barbudo, Los poemas de Antonio Machado, 442; and Valverde, ‘Introducción’, in Machado, Nuevas canciones, ed. Valverde, 92.

31 An earlier version of this article formed the subject of a lecture in the Olwen Reckert Seminar Series, delivered at Cardiff University in 2007.

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