A few of his poems take on the ethical lexicon and tones of the Generation of ’98. In these national aspirations he is prophetic. At least in the arts, the new self-awareness and energy will help fuel a cultural renaissance.

The Generation of ’98 had a violent political origin. When the United States defeated Spain, quickly and decisively, certain Spanish intellectual elements began to waken from the lethargy of long national decline, of passivity and an imitativeness of France, which earlier in the century had humiliated the nation when Napoleon 1 invaded and occupied Spain in 1808. Goya responded with fury in paintings and engravings at the grotesque massacre of Spanish civilians and soldiers. A century later, an inflamed generation of writers and thinkers became acutely aware that their country had again lost everything, and there was a response in the air—a demand for change.

A climate of defeat had beset the nation. Along with military disgrace, Spain was reduced territorially to the Iberian peninsula, with the exception of a few strips of land in North Africa. After centuries of decline, there were indeed few other signs of the golden chain of colonies, all now liberated and culturally rejecting Spain in favor of France. The Siglo de oro was long gone, and gold from the old Indian mines and plundered treasuries no longer poured in from the Americas to support an unproductive economy, one that could barely provide its people with bread.

While the new gods of the industrial revolution were winning Western Europe and North America to a faith in progress and prosperity, Spain was still castles, beauty, churches, landless peasants in Andalucía, and a skeletal industry in the north. There remained the cartoon version of the nation: Bizet’s colorful Carmen, a French dream of gypsies and toreadors: glittering, romantic, and utterly cheap and unreal. In truth the countryside was a medieval relic, feudal in land ownership, but at the same time the village and city life were fascinating for the emerging naturalist novelists who examined the lives of peasants and the other classes in this time-warped ancient nation. Spain had known Phoenicians, Greeks, lews, Romans, Visigoths, and Arabs who came to inhabit this Celtic-Iberian peninsula. The old structures were everywhere: a great functioning Roman aqueduct in the center of Segovia, Moorish watchtowers on the coast and the great mosque of Córdoba, a medieval synagogue in Toledo and the whitewashed Jewish ghetto of Sevilla, medieval and renaissance buildings in Salamanca, built on Roman foundations. Not least was the diversity of peoples, languages, and customs of prideful Catalans, Castilians, Andalusians, Galicians, and Basques.

Popular culture was alive and even preserved by the insignificance of industry and the stagnating economy. (Unfortunately there is a universal inverse relationship of growth between folkloric culture and economic prosperity.) Antonio Machado’s father, Antonio Machado Álvarez, was himself a folklorist, the founder of the Spanish Folklore Society, as well as the first anthologist of the lyrics of flamenco song. Popular culture was also celebrated in the festivals. To this day Spaniards still celebrate the Semana santa (Holy Week) of Málaga, with its floats carrying embellished statues of the Virgin and accompanied by the penitentes, men parading with crosses in white robes and high conical hats, alongside priests and uniformed guardias civiles. This is followed a week later by the celebration of the Feria de Sevilla, with its dancing sevillanas in the casetas, the bulls, and the aristocratic horsewomen riding as elegant, anachronistic dolls in the morning streets. Everywhere and in full strength was the canción anónima (popular song), which, with the exception of a brief period of total Italianization in the early sixteenth century, had nourished even the most culto (culturally European) of Spanish poets. Yet eternal popular culture aside, in 1898 the nation as a whole lay impoverished after its civil wars and seemed removed from Europe, ensconced behind the isolating walls of the Pyrenees.

Of this Spain drifting into the twentieth century, the esteemed novelist Arturo Barea wrote, “Her fertile but mismanaged lands were exhausted; the country was short of bread. And she was plagued by earthquakes, epidemics and flood which seemed to herald the Apocalypse in the eyes of the bewildered masses”2. Fifty years of church burning and those exhausting Carlist wars between traditionalists and liberals (liberal as a political term was invented in Spain) had preceded the military defeat of 1898. Spain had dissipated prestige and hegemony. It was no longer the dominant power of Europe as when it ruled Austria, parts of Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, most of the two continents of the Americas, even the Philippines.

Yet just at this low moment of national stagnation, the dynamic beginnings of a new Spain came on the scene. There was an influx of literary and social ideas from abroad and an explosion of Spanish talent that led to rebirth in all the arts. Perhaps a just comparison can be made with the emergence of the great novel in nineteenth-century Russia at a time when the nation was similarly characterized by feudal landowner-ship, abysmal government, and conflicting Russian and Europeanizing cultural currents. In Spain, soon the blossoming would become self-nourishing, leaving the initial ’98 impulse and programs behind.

Spain became a nation of world composers, painters, musicians, and four Nobel laureates in literature. In music there were the composers Falla, Albéniz, and Granados, all very Spanish as they were European, and Andrés Segovia who made the guitar an essential Spanish and classical instrument, and Pablo Casals who for most of his nine decades made his cello a favor to the world. The twentieth century would bring the painters luán Gris, Joan Miró, Dalí, and Picasso. In Barcelona the eccentric, brilliant Catalan Antonio Gaudi was a secret world figure of architecture in the early 1900s.

In literature the sense of renovation was messianic.