A group of literary men, who identified with the national problems, set out on quixotic missions to rediscover the soul of Spain. Students, artists, and intellectuals went abroad to bring back new ideas. Within Spain the provinces were discovered: landscapes in Antonio Machado, Azorín (José Martínez Ruiz), and Miguel de Unamuno; the popular song and ballad in Machado and later in Lorca and Alberti. Popular culture became legitimate raw material for art forms. The so-called primitive authors were resurrected: the medieval poets Gonzalo de Berceo, Juan Ruiz the archpriest of Hita, and Jorge Manrique. Spanish philosopher-essayists Miguel de Unamuno and José Ortega y Gasset were engaged in labors of reexamination and rebellion, critical introspection, and re-evaluation.

The decay in the national life did not of course automatically disappear upon being articulated by a group of ardent scholars, artists, and philosophers. Azorín wrote essay after essay calling for hard work and the exertion of la voluntad (the will). In politics the figures of ’98 had no single party or program—they did have an influential professor, Francisco Giner de los Ríos, founder of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (Free Institution of Learning), which educated many leading intellectuals, including the Machado brothers. Azorín, with his usual thoroughness, listed the evils against which his generation was rebelling:

The old times also mean the vicious practices of our politics, administrative corruption, incompetence, unlawful practices, nepotism, caciques, verbosity, the mañana attitude, parliamentary frauds, the overbearing quality of grandiloquence, the political expediencies which make those go astray who were quite prepared to do so, the falsified elections...all in a dense and impenetrable atmosphere, against all of this the Generation of 1898 protested. (Azorín 235~36)3

Few have better expressed these conditions of dismay and hope with more rhetorical mastery than Antonio Machado in “Una España joven” (“A Young Spain”), a poem vividly infused with the spirit of ’98 in good and not-so-good ways. It has the stentorian slogans of his programmatic poems of ’98, which stand in contrast to Machado’s essential poems that sing an image before the poet’s eyes or in bright memory. To the detriment of the poet’s name, his declamatory poems figure disproportionately high among those favored for comment and anthologies. They define a literary movement and period. But they are not Machado’s song. “A Young Spain” echoes the traditional “ship-of-state poem,” with its origin in famous paradigms in Alcaeus and Horace, and modernly in Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” His anthem is strong, devout, and trite:

A time of lies, of infamy, they dressed

our sorely wounded Spain in carnival costume,

and then they made her drunken, poor, debased

so that no hand might touch her open wound.

The past. Almost adolescent in an era,

an evil hour—pregnant with grim prophecy,

we wished to ride an unrestrained chimera

while shipwrecks rotted in the sleeping sea.

We left the squalid galley in the harbor,

choosing to sail a golden ship through gales

into high ocean waves. We sought no shore

but cast away anchor, rudder and sails...

However, most of Machado’s poems reflecting the ’98 ethos depict old stark villages and cities, and the peasants, fields, and mountains around them. Machado’s Fields of Castilla (1912) was, and still is, an ideological focal point, containing a few celebrated poems of mystical bombast as well as his enduring poems of land and people, which are at the heart of his volume. In those days Spaniards were obsessed with nationalist concerns, asking, “What is Spain?” Pedro Salinas, an outstanding poet of the Generation of 1927 and a seminal critic of Spanish literature, captures the spirit and preoccupations of the time:

The national tragedy functions as a lens, catching the spiritual energies of the new writers and joining them in concentrated form on a single, shining focal point, to lo español. For that which distinguishes the “man of ’98” is that he thinks Spain, feels Spain, and loves Spain over and above all his other activities, converting it into a completely preferred subject of mental preoccupation, making it into the measure of his art, of his life.4

The devotion of those of ’98 to Spain had nothing to do with jingoism or exaggerated patriotism. It was precisely the hollow ring of the chauvinists’ rhetoric that they abhorred and that Azorin decried. It is ironie that in the act of strong repudiation, some of their writing today should appear rhetorical and chauvinistic. However, they were set on discovering the “eternal” elements in the Spanish tradition, and this turned them to study Castilla, its grave and hermetic plateaus, the heart of Spain. Unamuno and Machado were the poets most associated with the discovery of Castilla, its isolated cities and depopulated páramos (harsh steppes). In their enthusiasm for Castilla, however, the writers of ’98 ignored Galicia and Catalunia (each busy with its own self-discovery in its own language). They even forgot about Andalucía. But the younger poets of the Generation of ’27 expanded the national vision to include Spain’s various distinct regions. There was Alberti’s exquisite minimalist lyrics about Cádiz and its port life; Lorca’s dramatic songs and ballads, including a series of moody poems he even wrote in gallego, the Portuguese dialect spoken in Galicia, and Aleixandre’s childhood city of Málaga, which in his pulsing verse is the “shadow of paradise.” Such provincialism with respect to Andalucía is odd, for most of the major Spanish poets of the twentieth-century rebirth are Andalusian—Antonio and Manuel Machado, Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Manuel Altolaguirre, Luis Cernuda, and the two Nobel laureates, Juan Ramón Jiménez and Vicente Aleixandre.

The instance of Machado and his Andalucía is a curious exception and anomoly. Don Antonio discovers his ballads and common speech first in his acquired homeland, Castilian Soria. There he instills in many poems, including his masterpiece “The Land of Alvargonzález,” what is parallel to what Wordsworth and Coleridge preach and voice in the Lyrical Ballads (1798): the common speech of the people in traditional forms free of essayistic meters and the clichés of worn poesy.