Resumen de Antonio Machado’s ‘Late Style’
This essay departs from the notion of the journey as an image of the poet's career in the poetry of Antonio Machado. This journey implies a process that is, for the most part, reactive rather than evolutionary, notably as in Campos de Castilla. The principal focus, however, is with a less readily explicable feature relating to the poetry that Machado wrote in the period of the Second Republic, specifically in his Cancionero apócrifo. The acknowledged difficulties of these poems and their tendency to fragmentation are considered by reference to what Edward Said, following Theodor Adorno, has termed ‘late style’, which he discerns in a wide range of artists, including Beethoven, Mann, Genet, Visconti and Glenn Gould. To highlight the distinctiveness of Machado’s kinship with these figures a contrast is established between the Spanish poet and the late poetry of his near-contemporary, W. B. Yeats.
