Usa Barea, New York: Grove Press, 1951, p. 9.

3  Azorín, Clásicos y modernos, Madrid: Archivos, 1919, pp. 235–236.

4  Salinas, Pedro, “Spanish Literature,” Columbia Directory of Modern European Literature, ed. Horatio Smith, New York: Columbia University Press, 1947, p. 770.

5  Machado began as a young Spanish poet in part influenced by a movement misleadingly called modernismo, which, despite protests from some Spanish critics, has not only nothing to do with the European and American modernism of Eliot, Borges, Beckett, and Lorca but represents very much what modernism was thoroughly rejecting: fin de siècle aestheticism. Yet Machado takes the best of modernismo, that concise, gnomic lyricism he shares with Juan Ramón Jiménez, which is found in many lyrics in Solitudes, Galleries, and Other Poems (1899–1907), in his sonnets, and in his late brief lyrics. Indeed, elements of modernismo persist after the more declamatory aspect of the ’98 poet has entirely disappeared. The sonnets are their own world, and especially those of the civil war, which speak with astonishing beauty, love, and tragedy.

6  Translated by Willis Barnstone.

7  Machado, Antonio, Obras: Poesía y prosa, ed. Aurora de Albornoz and Guillermo de Torre, Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1964, p. 711.

8  Ibid., p. 317.

9  A close literary friend of Machado who helped him very much during his lastjourney.

10 Pradal-Rodríguez, Gabriel, Antonio Machado, New York: Hispanic Institute, 1951, p. 12.

11 This episode was related to me by the philosopher Professor Juan Roura-Parella in fall 1958 in Middletown, Connecticut, where we were both teaching at Wesleyan University. Roura-Parella examined this brief text in its written form for accuracy. The event took place at Cervià de Ter, near Figueras, in the patio of a hacienda.

12 This story is confirmed by the Spanish writer and close friend of Machado, Corpus Barga. In his memoir—which appeared in Los últimos días de Don Antonio Machado, La Estafeda Literaria, Madrid, May 7, 1966, num. 349—Corpus Barga himself, rather than Navarro Tomás, tells the French customsofficer that with him is the poet Antonio Machado. Recalling that Navarro Tomás read over his narration to me, which I typed up for him to see, I preferto think that even this minor detail did not stray. I interviewed Tomás Navarro Tomás twice: at Middlebury College in 1947, and at Columbia University in August 1956, where I wrote down his dictation. Having said this, Barga was theangel of these days for Machado in caring for him and helping him to survive. In another version, parts of which are denied by Corpus Barga, another closefriend, Pepe y J. Xirau, describes in detail that there was an infernal walk ofsome six hundred meters to the frontier. The poet was drenched with rain andsnow. Machado passed to the frontier, two Senegalese soldiers in red fezzes lifted the iron chain, and Machado fainted, needing to be held up for the remaining walk to the French compound.

13 Barga, Corpus, Crónicas literarias, Edición de Arturo Ramoneda Salas, Madrid: Ediciones Júcar, 1985, p. 155.

14 Pradal-Rodríguez, Antonio Machado, p. 15.

15 Barga, Corpus, Crónicas literarias, p. 40.

16 Machado, José, Ultimas soledades del poeta Antonio Machado {recuerdos de su hermano José), Madrid: Forma Ediciones, 1977, p. 159. In 1962, in Madrid, the Spanish poet José Bergamín told me this story: One evening during the civil war, Manuel Azaña, president of Spain, had a party in the parliament attended by the leading political figures. Bergamín and Machado were also there. Azaña spent most of the evening chatting with the two poets.