b) Discuss the poetic interweaving of personal and national experience in Campos de

Castilla. 

Antonio Machado – campos de castilla – Arthur terry

- ‘what marks off campos de castilla from Machado’s earlier work is partly a matter of
circumstances’ – preface to páginas escogidas of 1917 …’a new personal relationship and a
new landscape, which he was also to explore in specifically human terms. This interplay
between the personal and the collective between his own inner life and the wish to
communicate on a more universal level – was to occupy Machado in various forms for the
rest of his life. The interesting thing, as far as Campos de Castilla is concerned, is the extent
to which the poems embody certain aims which Machado had already formulated, in theory
at least, before 1907’

- machado ‘has understood by this stage that any sense of his own identity is inseparable from
the twin functions of dream and memory’

- ‘the interplay between reality and meditation is a vital part of his treatment of landscape in
Campos de Castilla’

-‘the question of the relations between the creating self and external world was to occupy
Macahado for the rest of his life’

- ‘when one remembers the earlier poems, it is as if in Campos de Castilla Machado

had found a way of confronting the processes of the individual mind with an external
reality which, in its turn, could be interpreted in terms of something resembling a
collective memory’
- in madrid, his studies at the institución libre de enseñanza included organised
excursions to the country, and espcieally to the Sierra de Guadarrama. This particular
landscape, however, appears only occasionally in his poems and hardly at all in
campos de castilla – reason perhaps lies in its very familiarity ‘eres tú, Guadarrama,
Viejo amigo’ ‘it is only after 1912 that Machado fully encounters the very different
atmosphere of Upper Andalusia…the intervening experience of Soria has brought
with it new complexities and tensions;
- though machado is acutely aware of the visual qualities of the Castilian landscape,
the main impulse behind his writing is not aesthetic but historical : a sense of history
in which the past is judged critically in terms of its relevance to the present. Oddly
enough it is precisely here that Machado begins to move apart from other writers of
the 1898.
- look at pg 26

Xon de ros
- on diminutive scale in campos ‘by drawing attention to the diminutive scale, the
phrase evokes the perceptual sphere of the beautiful, the realm of the detailed,
which is inimical to the natural sublime’
- on his concentration of enivronment in Orillas ‘Machado's attention to the
particular detail—the turn of the river, the quality of its water, the trees along
the banks, and the differences between actual rivers—suggests an ecopoetic
 concern, in which the poet's relation to nature is re-imagined in such a way as
to encourage environmental awareness and responsibility’
- water - Water also carries a constant transformative element into Machado's poetry,
prompting some of the most lyrical passages of his work.

Cardwell
- on exaltation/stagnation - "[w]e are left with the idea that the pueblo passes
through stages of sporadic outbursts of exaltation and long periods of stagnation or
that the evolutionary process has, for the moment, slowed down’
- machado’s countryman – ‘for Machado his fellow countryman is given to sporadic
outbursts of exaltation and energy and long periods of repose which become, in the
long term, stagnation’
-

a) How important is the knowledge of the ideas of the Generación del 98 for an
understanding of Campos de Castilla? 

Antonio Machado and Rubén Darío: A Failure of Literary Assassination, or the Persistence of
Modernism in the Poetry of Antonio Machado
Author(s): Willis Barnstone

- In Paris Machado also meets Ruben Dario, who becomes Ma chado's immediate
source of a Spanish version of French fin de sidcle poetry. Rub6n, for his part, is so
taken by Antonio that he writes a prayer for him, an elegy, although Machado is not
dead, neither in body nor in his career
- In 1916 Machado is deeply in- volved in the anti-modernist Generation of 98
movement and writing poems to Jorge Manrique and Gonzalo de Berceo, poets who
meet his ideals
- Prophetically, Dario was temporarily wrong, for the modernist Machado he knew
and read was not to be fixed permanently as a modernist on a Greek marble relief.
The dreamy, sensual, subjective, humorous, individualistic Andalusian and young
aesthete revolted to become the grave, moralistic poet of the Generation of 98 – a
writer of declamatory alexandrines about Castile as the quintessential Spain
- In the 98 period, Machado reacts against Dario and French in-
fluence. In the autobiographical poem "Retrato" (XLVII), he ac- knowledges that he
had earlier "cut old roses from Ronsard's garden." Making this confession, he is
directly alluding to Ruben's Ronsard and Verlaine.
- ell. Machado writes that Ruben has heard "Lo violines / del otoiio en Verlaine, y que
ha cortado / las rosas de
Ronsard en los jardines de Francia." Soon all those roses and flowers will be so much
mush to him, and the whole garden, with its fragrances, birds, and near-by fountains
and music stands will be eliminated from Campos de Castilla (1912). He will believe,
or pre- tend to believe, that the French symbolist rose, the synesthesia in the poem
"Correspondence" (Baudelaire's symbolist manifesto), and all that Ruben Dario
 represents will, once and for all, be extirpated from his lines, never to contaminate
them again
- As a young poet writing at the turn of the century, Antonio Machado could not avoid
knowledge of modernismo, of the Nica- raguan renovator Ruben Dario, and of the
French school in which the modernistas had their origin. From them he learned
much of his early craft, as did most Spanish poets of the day. The continental avant-
garde and experimental movements, which in languages other than Spanish is called
modernism, had not yet developed, and those French poets who were precursors of
European modern- ism, Rimbaud, Mallarme, Apollinaire, were ignored by, perhaps
even unknown to, Machado and the modernista
- Antonio Machado's literary preoccupation lay outside the debate of the radicalisms
that were to characterize modernity in the arts
- He was troubled by the strong conflict he saw in himself between modernism and
Generation of 98 tendencies
- In one camp were Paris, Dario, Jimenez, and his own brother Manuel; in the other
were the Instituci6n Libre de Ensefianza, Azorin, Unam
- to understand what Machado saw as excessively modernist tendencies in the early
poems, I will deal with some poems which he chose not to reprint in later editions of
his books
- ‘Machado’s increasing powers of observation and understanding…also because his
thoughts come to centre more and more on what it means to be in living in a
particular place at a particular time…other contemporary writers, notably Unamuno
and azorin had already created an image of castile which was part of the wider
reassessment of Spanish values and culture which was gathering weight at the end
of the nineteeth century.
- ‘generation of 1898 and the general mood of disillusionment which was crystalised
by the loss of cuba’
- ‘what makes it possible to speak of a ‘generation’ is not so much a question of
chronology (unamuno, for instance, was nine years older than Machado) as of the
existence of a common sensibility: the awareness of a particular crisis of integrity
and the search for a means of regeneration at both the individual and social levels’
- Machado interview : ‘soy posterior a ella [i.e. the 1898 generation]. Mi relación con
aquellos hombres – Unamuno, Baroja, ortega, valle-inclán – es la de un discípulo con
sus maestros. Cuando yo nacía a la vida literaria y filosófica, todos aquellos hombres
eran ya valores cuajados y en sazón` ‘it seems certain that, in writing the poems of
campos de castilla, machado was both synthesizing a great deal of what had already
been expressed in a more scattered form by other members of the generation and
suggesting a different kind of relationship between the past and the future’
Machado shares with Unamuno a sense of the central importance of Castile in the
moulding of Spanish traditions, and both ae haunted by a landscape who present
poverity is overshadowed by the memory of past greatness. This contrast, often
painful in its intensity, goes with an awareness of certain permanent qualities –
austerity, dignity and at times cruelty – which have survived the fluctuations of
history’ – respect for the quality of humble lives which one finds in a poem like
campos de soria ‘when one remembers the earlier poems, it is as if in Campos de
Castilla Machado had found a way of confronting the processes of the individual
 mind with an external reality which, in its turn, could be interpreted in terms of
something resembling a collective memory’
- The one he most resembles in his vision of Castile is the Unamuno of en torno al
casticismo …in Unamuno’s later descriptive essays, as in most of azorín, the note of
genuine criticism is absent or, at the best, overlaid but other, more personal
considerations….for machado, to dwell on the past associations of such a landscape
is ultimately sterile’ – look at el dios ibero penultimate stanza ‘the distinctive touch
comes in the last line: the suggestion that beyond any vague hope of a better future,
there is a possibility that the future will make available the true meaning of the past
– a complex interlocking of time’ = look at a orillas del duero – a trechos…’when this
first appears, it is simply physical but the way in which the poem develops suggests
that this is also a weariness of the spirit, something which is also to some extent
identified with the landscape and the various ideas associated with it – above all, the
feeling of decadence of the country’
- In Machado's 1904 poem "Al maestro Ruben Dario" (CXLVII), the poet speaks of
Ruben's having heard "los violines del otofio, de Verlaine." The reference is to
Verlaine's melancholy "Chanson d'Automne." While Machado tells us that Dario
heard Verlaine's "Chanson d'Automne," Geoffrey Ribbans points out that Machado
- also echoed the music of this famous, ubiquitous poem in his own
"Otofio" (Ribbans, 254), another of the poems removed from Soledades.
- Castile (at the expense of the rest of Spain) became the focal subject for the writers
of the Generation of 98, and Miguel de Una- muno seemed to be the poet most
faithful to its ideals. Yet Unamuno was an uneven poet and often with a wooden ear.
Ortega wrote,
"Yo encuentro en Machado un comienzo de esta novisima poesia,
cuyo mas fuerte representante seria Unamuno si no despreciara los sentidos tanto
- Machado himself did much, perhaps the most, to spread these views, and we see
him struggling with the two demons of moder- nismo and noventayochismo. In 1917
he wrote in the Prologue of a new edition of Soledades a defense of his early poems,
arguing that they were not mere modernist sensation but something more wor- thy
and profound
- . Indeed, the rejected poems throbbed too blatantly and easily with a
characteristically French modernist "palpitaci6n del espiritu," and Machado excised
them from later collections precisely because that internal quiver was too conspic-
uous, too facile. Moreover, this deep internal quiver had its origin in the same
romantic spirit which infused the work of Becqur
- . Insofar as Machado excised French mod- ernist tendencies from his poems, he also
moved away from the desired spiritual shudder. This was inevitable and logical, since
the "palpitaci6n," the "frisson," was a modernist quality to begin with, and
consequently, rather than be emphasized, it had to go, at least temporarily, when in
Campos the modernist mood and sensibility were suppressed.
- The aesthetic reason has to do with a surfeit of modernism and
a consequent disgust. The smells, music, the beautiful, the pure, by dint of constant
repetition and inflation, became a parody of beauty for Machado, a "kichification" of
feeling. The unremittingly sentimental world of sensations was, through
deformation, grotesque, and Machado was suffocating from a plethora of modernist
paraphernalia.
 - "A Juan Ram6n Jimenez’ "A Don Miguel de Unamuno"

- The two poems clearly reflect the poles of Machado's orientation:

98 and modernism. The poem to Jimenez would have been out of place, an
interruption, had it been placed among other 98 poems
of the volume. Found at the end, however, it does not war with the general scheme,
but does permit Antonio to honor Juan Ram6n Jimenez to whom he has continued to
write and confess and consider as friend and mentor. More, it points to a future in
which modernism, under some other guise, will not be despised. How ap- propriate
that the Castilian flag volume of the Generation ends with the modernist line, "S6lo la
fuente se oia." The fountain is not only Andalusian / French / modernist-and blatantly
so but is his favorite metaphorical device for alerting us to the ticking passage of time.
Poetry, he reminds us, occurs only in time, when the night is done. That time carries
with it the memory of earlier literary experiences, of Dario and the assassinated Dario.
Despite his attempt to conceal memory in the olvido, Antonio Machado remembers
very well, remembers his whole literary history, and will continue doing so till the last
writing in the Collioure noteb

- The last formal quality I wish to consider is Machado's use of

- the sonnet in the late poetry. The use of the sonnet would not normally signify any
argument pro or contra modernismo were Machado himself not to have such distinct
notions linking the form (which he disparages with Ronsard, Ruben, and his
modernist brother Manuel). In order to reconcile Antonio's declarations, which seem
to be in contradiction to his increasing use of the form, we should understand again
that a struggle is going on in Machado between his aversion to the sonnet, which he
associates with su- perficial modernism, and his attraction to it. The latter won out, for
he was to use the sonnet in diverse ways: to express philosophy, love, war sentiments,
and childhood recollections. When Machado discovers the sonnet, his negative
reservations are connected with his old idol and nemesis, Ruben. Before he can
initiate a form, in mid-career, whose defects, dangers, modernist deflation he es-
pecially associates with Ruben Dario, he must once again attack Dario, denying him
any life in the composition of a sonnet

- The old struggle with modernism continues. The foreign sonnet did not engender the
same enthusiasm for the 98 mind as the Spanish romance – look at ‘la tierra de
alvargonzález
-

Antonio Machado – campos de castilla – Arthur terry

- at the time machado began to write, the influence of darío was inescapable
…’looking back on this early phase in 1917, Machado writes as though he had been
simultaneously attracted and repelled by the work of the older poet. What is clear
from his remarks is that Darío at this stage stood for an ideal of aesthetic refinement
which tended to neglet the true sources of the imagination’ – machado does the
opposite ‘pensaba yo que el element poético no era la palabra por su valor fónico, ni
 el color, ni la línea…sino una honda palpitación de espíritu’ ‘here the implied
criticism of darío and of modernism in general is accurate enough. At the same time,
machado is speaking with hindsight, and in doing so, concealing something of the
conflict which he clearly experienced at this early point in his work’

Evidence : difference between the original edition of soledades and the revised
version – soledades galerias y otros poemas 1907 – Machado excluded a number of
the more obviously modernista poems from the later edition BUT the modernista
influence is still preserved ‘horizonte’ and ‘abril florecia’

- ‘the question of the relations between the creating self and external world was to
occupy Macahado for the rest of his life…the fact that such a problem lies at the
centre of Machado’s work means that he is an essentially Romantic artist’

- There is good reason to suppose that Machado would have endorsed Baudelaire’s
famous statement ‘[the modern concept of art] is to create a suggestive magic
including at the same time object and subject, the world outside the artist and the artist
himself’

Critical reports: ideology and expression warner, r

COULD BE IN PARA 1 BUT NEEDS REVIEW

Barnstone comments that ‘in Unamuno’s later descriptive essays, as in most of Azorín, the
note of genuine criticism is absent or, at the best, overlaid by other, more personal
considerations…for Machado, to dwell on the past associations of such a landscape is
ultimately sterile’. 1 This quote can be used to identify Machado’s distinctive differences
from the tendencies of Generación 98 for example in El Dios Ibero. The penultimate stanza,
especially the line ‘ni el pasado ha muerto, ni está el mañana – ni el ayer – escrito’ 2 gives a
personal philosphical suggestion of a ‘complex interlocking of time’3 as it implies that the
future will allow a better understanding of the past. Barnstone’s criticsm can also be applied
to Orillas del duero as this poem also illustrates a element of ‘genuine criticism’ 4 which
differs Machado from his contemporaries

Machado does employ the use of the sonnet which does not ‘signify any argument pro or
contra modernismo were Machado himself not to have such distinct notions linking the
form’5. ANYALYSE AND SHIT Machado had an aversion to the sonnet due its association
with superficial modernism but he was also attracted to it and thus employed it to express

2
Different poem
3

5
philosophy, love and childhood recollections. the old struggle with modernism continues. The
foreign sonnet did not engender the same enthusiasm for the 98 mind as the Spanish romance
– look at ‘la tierra de alvargonzález

- At one remove