Resumen de ‘¡Yunques sonad; enmudeced campanas!’: Antonio Machado and the Forging of a Poetic Conscience of the Race
Antonio Machado’s creative evolution from an examination of self-consciousness in Soledades, Galerías y otros poemas (1902–1907) to the forging of a poetic conscience of his race in Campos de Castilla (1912–1917) was the result of a crisis of artistic conscience (1903–1904) in the aftermath of the national crisis of the 1898 Disaster, a continual point of reference for the poet. The rejection of pure art for committed social art was in response to the call of the prose writers of his generation to join in the collective task of national moral and political rearmament, creating a new secular heterodox Spain in opposition to traditional orthodox Spain. The poetic expression of Machado’s national social conscience was informed by observation of life in Soria and Baeza and by a cultural imagination that assimilated in a poetic dialogue the collective vision and commonplaces of his literary tribe—Unamuno, Azorín, Baroja and Ortega y Gasset. It was a Republican conscience inherited from his father ‘Demófilo’ and the Institución Libre de Enseñanza; assimilating ideas from (Christian) Anarchism and Socialism, its expression became increasingly revolutionary. He was to be the fore-runner of the committed poets of the thirties whom he would join in the cultural war-effort of the Second Republic in defence of that conscience.
