The celebration, in this year 2025 which is ending, of the 150 years since the birth of Antonio Machado has given rise to the publication of an infinity of laudatory texts on the various facets of the poet already sufficiently known and known: that of the childhood memory of a Seville court, that of the republican, that of the inconsolable widower, that of the good man… But we cannot resign ourselves to this “Holy Machadian year” which ends without saying what seems essential in the poet and his poetry; which gives a uniqueness to each person and from which we can learn an essential lesson: Machado is the poet who truly remembered.
He maintained that for a poem to move us, to reach our soul, to truly make us vibrate, it must refer to a real, lived experience. I believe that this lesson is not limited only to the field of poetry but also to life in general and even to public life itself. In a present where politicians They use grandiose words like solidarity, “sustainability” or “sisterhood”. and they occasionally talk about “citizens” without really thinking about specific men and real women, Machado’s conception of poetry can be more than useful and offer practical application. How can it be useful to those who fill social networks with verses that sound more or less good, but which are instantly forgotten because they are perfectly empty and devoid of an anchor that remains engraved in our memory.
Think, yes, of the beings of flesh and blood, of those who lost everything at DANA and who have not yet received help or of the party colleagues who were sexually harassed.. Think, if we talk about love, about the people we have loved in our lives, don’t make meaningless theories….
We return to Machado, to the essentials of Machado and to his definition of poetry as “word in time”, a word which is previously “experience in time” and “memory of this experience”. If the poet speaks to us about the past, he must allude to a specific memory and, by speaking to us, relive this memory within himself.; not think but see the images it evokes. For Machado, it is not worth talking abstractly about the passage of years and the expiration of existence. In a well-known text, he put into the mouth of his apocryphal character Juan de Mairena some reflections which go in this direction and which distinguish thought poetry from lived poetry.
To explain the difference between one and the other, he cites the verses of Jorge Manrique on the death of his father and the true memory that he keeps of this time gone forever, “the ladies, their hairstyles, their dresses, their smells, those plated clothes they wore…”. To these verses which visualize a yesterday which really existed and which its author experienced in his youth, he opposes the sonnet devoid of nostalgia that Calderón wrote “To the flowers” and which does not speak to us of real roses but of imaginary, abstract, cold roses: “When they bloomed, the roses rose early / and to grow old they bloomed…”.
The example responds to a romantic maxim: “The deepest is the most universal”. All of Machado’s poetry is born from this conviction: the most intimate, the most hidden, the most concrete and apparently intransferable is what unites us with all of humanity. And one man’s happiness or pain is that of all men.. This principle is used to make verses, pass laws and cure diseases. If we do not think that the other is like us, neither poetry, nor politics, nor medical science is possible.
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