Solitudes and Other Early Poems

Antonio Machado is, without a doubt, the father of modern Spanish lyric poetry: a bridge that stretches between Bécquer, Rubén Darío and the generation of Jiménez, Lorca, Alberti, Guillén and Aleixandre. An early visit to Paris and an engagement with Symbolism, and its Spanish equivalent, modernismo, in the shape of Rubén Darío, was to determine his course as a poet. Machado, however, unlike many of the French symbolists and perhaps because he was Spanish, never turned his back on common re...