Antonio Machado

Antonio Machado (1875–1939) was the leading poet of Spain’s renowned Generation of 1898, so named by Jose Azorin in 1913 to designate a group of young writers who, in the face of defeat (1898) in the Spanish-American War, proclaimed a moral and cultural rebirth for Spain. He spent most of his life in Castile and his best poetry was influenced by its austere and dramatic landscape. His Poesias Completas appeared in 1936. Forced to leave Spain because of his support of the Loyalist cause during the Spanish civil war, he crossed the Pyrenees on foot and died in France a month later. His work, which appears in virtually every anthology of modern Spanish literature, has been a major influence upon the Spanish poets of the latter half of the 20th Century. His titles in English include: Del Camino, 1974 (trans. by Michael Smith, Dulfour Editions, Inc.), Times Alone: Selected Poems, 1990 (trans. by Robert Bly, Univ. Press of New England), Selected Poems, 1990 (trans. by Alan S. Trueblood, Harvard Univ. Press), and Machado’s Writing and the Spanish civil war, 1998 (James Whiston, Liverpool Univ. Press).

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