Antonio Machado is, without a doubt, the father of modern Spanish lyric poetry: a bridge that stretches between Bécquer, Rubén Darío and the generation of Jiménez, Lorca, Alberti, Guillén and Aleixandre. An early visit to Paris and an engagement with Symbolism, and its Spanish equivalent,
modernismo
, in the shape of Rubén Darío, 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 as 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 significance from the temporal flux in which human beings live. This fully bilingual edition of Machado's earliest mature work presents the poems from Soledades, including the sections Del Camino, Canciones and Humorismos, Fantasías, Apuntes.