26/07/2013
Writer and poet
"Am I classical or romantic?" Antonio Machado Ruiz asked himself in his Autorretrato. As it is known, he left this question unanswered. But this does not mean that the question was meaningless. For many European poets of his generation, the first modernist generation, choosing between classicism or romanticism was a crucial issue. The other Spanish poets of the end-of-century generation (Unamuno, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Manuel Machado) tended to insert themselves in the Romantic tradition; Octavio Paz would later say of both them and their American contemporaries that their modernism had represented the true Hispanic romanticism, since the previous one, the nineteenth century one, was only formed by rhetorical gestures in the field of Spanish language.
By contrast, modernist poetry was marked by the search for a new classicism in countries that had experienced a true romanticism. The Great War had its influence on this (which the Spanish did not experience), considered by the poets of the fighter generation as the tragic result of the romantic revolution. That is why the British poets, for example, rejected any continuity from the romanticism represented by Yeats' poetry and adopted radically classical attitudes. Hence T. E. Hulme's condemnation of romanticism as a "scattered religion", Wilfred Owen's rejection of patriotic romanticism (both Hulme and Owen died in the trenches) and, subsequently, T. S. Eliot's famous self-definition ("classical in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion") or W.H. Auden's assertion of classical forms as an antidote and barrier against "the excesses of the self". Yeats himself, in his mature poetry, tried to join a classicism that he identified with the ideas of order and hierarchy.
Antonio Machado tried to go beyond this dichotomy: "Am I classical or romantic? I do not know". From Romanticism he had inherited a problem: the existence of the self, of the poetic subject. He solved it early in time by asserting that in the depths of the solipsistic poet, the self dissolves into a "hall of mirrors". Like Pessoa (or, later, Max Aub) he was tempted by heteronyms, the deliberate fragmentation of personality into a number of different poets (the apocrypha). But against the new classicism of hierarchy and authoritarian order, he held the utopia of poetry as the way of communicating among peers. Poetry: "something heart-warming", a dialogue between incomplete subjectivities, which only by fraternal and collective singing manage to be constructed as subjects: "Pay attention: / a lonely heart / is not a heart." He will advocate then, as opposed to the "new poetry" (the "classicism" of the avant-garde), the great metaphor of the "singing machine" the poetic machine whereby the people build in common the "new sentimentality".
Antonio Machado's poetry represented an attempt to overcome the chaos introduced into modern culture by romanticism by abolishing two codes--the classical tradition and the Biblical tradition--in which the communication between poets and readers had been based before the exaltation of individual genius. But unlike "new classics" like Hulme and Eliot, he refrained from doing so from an authoritarian poetics. The Machado muse was a democratic muse. Moreover, it was demotic. Perhaps, he naively believed in the creativity of a people that modernity had disintegrated, but refused to admit the existence of the masses, the myth that pushed other modernist poets to be locked in their ivory towers, from which not few of them plunged into totalitarian adventures.
(Antonio Machado was born in Seville on July 26, 1875)