But then in 1912, by the chance assignment of his next job, Machado is sent to a new Andalucía: the rural Andalusian city of Baeza where he teaches, and Úbeda where he strolls on long afternoons. He tastes the salt of popular songs and he, too, as the ultimate poet of ’98, enlarges his vision to include his newfound lyrical south. The younger Lorca will spend most of his literary life as a genius of the popular (the traditional folkloric) in poems and plays, and will die at thirty-eight. Machado turns thirty-seven when he begins to sing in his own, original Andalusian voice.

Antonio Machado, a meditative poet of remembered landscape, begins his pilgrimage

Machado is a meditative nature poet who has written poems about landscape in which no speaker seems to exist (a quality he shares with classical Chinese poetry), and who is the metaphysical explorer of dream, landscape, and consciousness below language.

Antonio Machado y Ruiz began his pilgrimage, from a landscape of memory to the sea of death, in the white city of Sevilla, where he was born on July 26, 1875. In that same year Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague. Astrology and stars aside, there is in these poets a coincidence of some essential qualities. They are the quietest, most introspective, and landscape-oriented writers of modern poetry. Landscape, or the open-eyed dream of it, does all. It is thing and symbol. Semioticians speak with restrained ecstasy about that instant of significant communication when all codes are right, when semiosis takes place. For Machado and Rilke the evocation of significant landscape, usually through dream, is the instant of semiosis—when it all comes together. Both these philosophical poets usually left philosophy and theory aside in their poetry and expressed all idea through sound and image, through incantatory speech and landscape. Don Antonio, however, managed in his two long series of notation poems he called “Proverbs and Songs” to combine his passion for philosophy with image. This is his aphoristic side, never without whimsy and self-mockery, in which he manipulated image to tell his metaphysical tale.

Machado’s childhood years in Sevilla pervade the early poems. Antonio was only eight when the family moved to Madrid in 1883, but images of the Andalusian city continue to lurk in his poems till the very end. Sevilla, with its gardens, fountains, white walls, ruined churches, cypress trees, and solitary plazas, was a city with nature in its center. Madrid does not appear in the poems (until two late poems written there during the civil war), although it is in Madrid that Machado became a poet. But there is a logic to the preference of Sevilla over Madrid. The most obvious reason is that Antonio Machado and his poet brother Manuel did not begin their careers as late Baudelairean city poets; rather, following turn-of-the-century measures of what poetry was, they were recorders of nature. It was Sevilla, not Madrid, that allowed them nature and the city at once.

But beyond the nature of the city is Antonio Machado’s obsessive turn to memory. Machado writes that “love is in the absence.” In fact the absent, remembered place is more significant than the place where one is. So in Madrid Machado recalls Sevilla. Only in Soria, unique in his experience, will he actually write about the Soria of the moment, in part, because this small provincial capital northeast of Madrid in Castilla la Nueva (New Castilla) corresponds so completely to his Generation of ’98 ideas of Castilla, including its ruinous decadence, its folklore, its profundity. But once gone from Soria to Baeza in northern Andalucía, he will dream back constantly to the years 1907–12 in Soria, where he discovered the land, where he met and married his very young wife Leonor, who died three years later (1912). The many poems in Fields of Castilla about Leonor are written in Baeza. But, as mentioned, in Baeza Don Antonio also discovers Andalusian song, which figures strongly in New Songs (1917–1930). But I should point out that most of the songs written in Baeza, while using a melody and form inspired by Andalucía in the south, still sing about Soria, its inhabitants, and the mountains of the north.

After Antonio left Baeza for Segovia in the north, there was the same transfer of vision to the earlier place. Now he recalls the south. And finally, in the terrible days of civil war, he returns once again to childhood Sevilla. In fact a line found in his pocket a few days after he died in exile in Collioure, France, is “Estos días azules y este sol de la infancia” (These blue days and this sun of childhood).