Antonio Machado Biography Quotes 2 Report mistakes

Early Life and Family
Antonio Machado was born in Seville on 26 July 1875 into a family steeped in letters and folklore. His father, Antonio Machado Alvarez, known as Demofilo, was a noted folklorist who collected Andalusian songs and proverbs; his mother, Ana Ruiz, kept the household together through frequent moves and reversals of fortune. The brothers Manuel and Antonio grew up close, trading verses and enthusiasms from an early age, while another brother, Jose, pursued painting. In 1883 the family settled in Madrid, where the death of their father a decade later forced the children to early responsibility and sharpened Antonio's sober sense of life.

Education and Intellectual Formation
In Madrid, Machado studied at the Institucion Libre de Ensenanza, absorbing the liberal, secular pedagogy of Francisco Giner de los Rios and colleagues who prized ethics, rigorous observation, and a modern, European outlook. This schooling shaped his lifelong habits: clear prose, moral reflection, and an austere style stripped of ornament. Drawn to theater and the literary cafes, he joined the emerging Generation of 98, engaging with writers such as Miguel de Unamuno, Pio Baroja, Azorin, Ramon Maria del Valle-Inclan, and the younger Juan Ramon Jimenez, all of whom wrestled with Spain's crisis of identity after 1898.

Paris and the First Books
Machado traveled to Paris at the end of the century, working for a publisher and immersing himself in the currents of symbolism and modernismo. He met Ruben Dario, whose musical innovations he admired, and attended lectures by Henri Bergson, whose ideas on time and intuition left a lasting imprint. These encounters informed his first book, Soledades (1903), a sequence of introspective, symbolist poems later expanded as Soledades, galerias y otros poemas. The early work explores memory, dream, and the passing of time, already hinting at the lucid simplicity that would become his hallmark.

Teacher in Soria and Marriage
After passing competitive examinations, Machado took a post as a secondary-school French teacher in Soria in 1907. The stark Castilian landscape, its plain light and quiet river, entered his poetry. In Soria he married Leonor Izquierdo in 1909. Their brief happiness ended when Leonor fell ill with tuberculosis. A stay in Paris for study and treatment could not change the course of her disease, and she died in 1912. Grief and the Sorian plains converged in Campos de Castilla, where Machado's voice turned outward to the land and to the moral condition of Spain, abandoning the ornate mannerisms of modernismo for a spare, ethical clarity. The maxims and brief songs gathered as Proverbios y cantares, including the famous lines "Caminante, no hay camino; se hace camino al andar", belong to this cycle.

Baeza Years: Study and Solitude
Seeking distance from sorrow, Machado accepted a transfer to Baeza. The small Andalusian town became a place of study and inwardness. He read philosophy, continued to ponder Bergson, and corresponded with Unamuno while contributing occasional articles. The countryside and humble tradespeople he observed there kept his poetry grounded in the real. The fruits of this period include pages later gathered in Nuevas canciones, where epigram and song refine his meditative art into brief, resonant forms.

Segovia and Public Engagement
In 1919 Machado moved to Segovia. There he helped promote a Popular University, a civic project through which local intellectuals offered lectures and courses to wider audiences. He traveled frequently to Madrid for literary gatherings, exchanging ideas with writers and thinkers such as Ortega y Gasset and Juan Ramon Jimenez. During the 1920s he and his brother Manuel, who had forged his own distinct, more baroque style, collaborated on a series of theater pieces that brought the brothers public success, including works like La Lola se va a los puertos and La duquesa de Benameji. Their artistic complicity did not erase differences of temperament and, later, politics, but the partnership showed Machado's ability to adapt his lyric sensibility to the stage. He was elected to the Royal Spanish Academy, though he never took up the seat.

Guiomar and Late Lyric
In Madrid Machado formed an attachment to a woman he celebrated in poems under the name Guiomar, often associated with Pilar de Valderrama. The delicate tone of those lyrics restores, without illusion, the possibility of love late in life. At the same time he developed a second voice under the heteronyms Abel Martin and, especially, Juan de Mairena. In dialogues, aphorisms, and classroom monologues, Juan de Mairena offered playful, probing reflections on poetry, politics, and education. The collection Juan de Mairena, published in the 1930s, distills Machado's pedagogical spirit and skeptical wisdom.

The Second Republic and War
A quiet man of firm civic conscience, Machado welcomed the Second Republic. He taught in a Madrid institute, wrote prose reflections for newspapers, and defended a humane, democratic Spain. The outbreak of the Civil War in 1936 found him in Madrid under siege. He wrote poems of solidarity, elegies, and addresses to keep morale, among them the well-known lament for Federico Garcia Lorca, "El crimen fue en Granada", mourning the murdered poet and friend as a symbol of the nation's tragedy. As the capital emptied, Machado was evacuated with other writers and teachers to Valencia and later to Barcelona, continuing to write and to speak with the sober gravity that had marked him since Soria.

Exile and Death
In the winter of 1939, as Republican lines collapsed, Machado left Barcelona with his mother, Ana Ruiz, and his brother Jose for France. Crossing the border on foot among crowds of civilians, they found refuge in the coastal town of Collioure. Exhausted and ill, Machado died there on 22 February 1939. His mother died shortly afterward. In his pocket lay a slip of paper with a final, luminous note: "Estos dias azules y este sol de la infancia", a farewell that tied his last days to the earliest light of Seville.

Style, Thought, and Legacy
Machado's poetry charts a movement from symbolist interiority to a limpid, ethical realism attentive to landscape, history, and the common life. He forged a cadenced plain speech that carries philosophical reflection without abstraction, and he gave Spanish letters aphorisms that pass from book to memory with the force of proverbs. Set among the writers of the Generation of 98, he stands out for the balance of tenderness and austerity, the moral steadiness that neither dogma nor despair could undo. Through the plays with Manuel, the dialogues of Juan de Mairena, the Sorian and Castilian poems of loss and country, and the wartime pages of witness and elegy, Antonio Machado became, and remains, one of the most beloved voices in modern Spanish poetry.

Our collection contains 2 quotes who is written by Antonio, under the main topics: Wisdom - Journey.

Other people realated to Antonio: Jose Ortega Y Gasset (Philosopher)