Antonio Machado is, without a doubt, the father of modern Spanish lyric poetry: a bridge that stretches between Becquer, Ruben Dario and the generation of Jimenez, Lorca, Alberti, Guillen, Cernuda, Aleixandre and Otero. An early visit to Paris and an engagement with Symbolism, and its Spanish equivalent, modernism, in the shape of Ruben Dario, 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 reality. Rather, reality and natural images were sacred to him as mysterious cyphers, flickering shadows at the mouth of the Cave. He was a deeply humanitarian poet; he believed in human emotions and intuitions, and he was always opposed to the baroque in Spanish poetry because he saw it as cerebral or conceptual and therefore an inadequate means of receiving significances from the temporal flux in which human beings live. This edition is fully bilingual.

Translated by: Luis Ingelmo, Michael Smith