Of the three great masters of Spanish poetry, modern —Juan Ramón Jiménez, Miguel de Unamuno and Antonio Machado— this last is the only one that has never been in purgatory the writers after they die. If the first happened to bill their exquisite idealism symbolist and the second, his rocky prosaísmo metaphysical, Machado has been alive. Perhaps because the supporters of the I clung to his Loneliness (1903), while the supporters of the us were Fields of Castilla (1912), already in life was a rare case of author popular and prestigious at the same time.
in Addition, their civic engagement during the Civil War it became the icon that could not be their peers. Juan Ramón went into exile in August of 1936 and Unamuno died in December of that same year, after supporting the coup of Franco, to criticize him after. The author of Juan de Mairena, however, resisted until the end of the war and shared the fate of half a million of exiles, who crossed the Pyrenees in the winter of 1939 fleeing the advance of franco. He died the 22 of February in Collioure and there is still buried.
even then they turned off their star. Rather on the contrary. If the poets most influential of the post —war period (Gil de Biedma, Valente, Angel González— traveled to your grave in 1959 to pay homage to him —and, incidentally, to promote themselves as a generation— their disciples of eighties —with Luis García Montero to the head— claimed responsibility for the concept machadiano of “new sentimentality” for rehumanizar and repolitizar the Spanish opera scene after the measles-experimental seventies.
The truth is that even the neovanguardismo culturalist of the last things he had managed to overshadow his influence because in 1969, a year before that Josep Maria Castellet published his anthology, another Catalan, Joan Manuel Serrat, he released his famous album dedicated to Machado. In case outside little, Extremoduro, which has just announced a farewell tour, returned the poet to the stadiums to include in the 1996 four verses of ‘Through the lands of Spain’ in ‘Looking for a moon’, the song that opens her album is more successful: Agila. Since then —paisano, progressive, or rock— there is not a single language on the earth who is not aware that the poetry is the word at the time or that, blow by blow, make the road by walking.