personal. In fact, except for the verse of Juan Ramon Jimenez, it would
be in America and England rather than in Spain, in Aldington and Amy
Lowell, that one would find analogous aims and methods. The influence
of the symbolists and the turbulent experimenting of the Nicaraguan
broke down the bombastic romantic style current in Spain, as it was
broken down everywhere else in the middle nineteenth century. In
Machado's work a new method is being built up, that harks back more to
early ballads and the verse of the first moments of the Renaissance
than to anything foreign, but which shows the same enthusiasm for the
rhythms of ordinary speech and for the simple pictorial expression of
undoctored emotion that we find in the renovators of poetry the world
over. _Campos de Castilla_, his first volume to be widely read, marks
an epoch in Spanish poetry.

Antonio Machado's verse is taken up with places. It is obsessed with
the old Spanish towns where he has lived, with the mellow sadness of
tortuous streets and of old houses that have soaked up the lives of
generations upon generations of men, crumbling in the flaming silence
of summer noons or in the icy blast off the mountains in winter. Though
born in Andalusia, the bitter strength of the Castilian plain, where
half-deserted cities stand aloof from the world, shrunken into their
walls, still dreaming of the ages of faith and conquest, has subjected
his imagination, and the purity of Castilian speech has dominated his
writing, until his poems seem as Castilian as Don Quixote.

"My childhood: memories of a courtyard in Seville,
and of a bright garden where lemons hung ripening.
My youth: twenty years in the land of Castile.
My history: a few events I do not care to remember."

So Machado writes of himself. He was born in the eighties, has been a
teacher of French in government schools in Soria and Baeza and at
present in Segovia--all old Spanish cities very mellow and very
stately--and has made the migration to Paris customary with Spanish
writers and artists. He says in the _Poema de un Dia_:

Here I am, already a teacher
of modern languages, who yesterday
was a master of the gai scavoir
and the nightingale's apprentice.

He has published three volumes of verse, _Soledades_ ("Solitudes"),
_Campos de Castilla_ ("Fields of Castile"), and _Soledades y Galerias_
("Solitudes and Galleries"), and recently a government institution, the
Residen