Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/857

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 groaning 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.

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:

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,