TIME IN THE POETRY OF ANTONIO MACHADO AND JOSE HIERRO (SPAIN)
Abstract
The integrity of a work of art is to a large degree the subject matter of literary criticism, a feature especially emphasized by the Russian Formalists. In this consideration of two modern Spanish poets, Antonio Machado and Jose Hierro, the unity of the content and form in their poetry is brought out by closely interrelating the literary movements in which they have been classed, Symbolism and Futurism, with their perceptions of time. This poetic analysis differs from previous studies of Machado and Hierro in that it identifies a linguistic dominant within Symbolism and Futurism, around which Machado's and Hierro's poems are constructed. It is shown that Machado's perception of time as an immobilized essential past in opposition to a mobilized pedestrian or everyday present, reflects the Symbolist dichotomy of reality into essential and non-essential. It is further argued that this temporal dichotomy is conveyed in Machado by two different types of sentence construction: (1) foregrounding of the grammatical components, which immobilizes the sentence and brings out the transcendental or essential past, (2) backgrounding of the grammatical components, which mobilizes the sentence and destroys the past while bringing out the present. It is proposed that Jose Hierro is a futurist poet, in part, because his conception of poetry illustrates the futurist aesthetic principle of speed. This aesthetic principle is diametrically opposed to the symbolist aesthetic principle, and it is by deconstructing Machado's symbolist conception of time that Hierro arrives at his futurist conception of time. Hierro's perception of time is defined as a moving interaction among future, past and present which illustrates the futurist conception of reality as a multifaceted moving entity. It is shown how the phonological sentence captures the temporal movement in Hierro's poems. It is concluded that, just as the formalists proposed, Machado's and Hierro's different perceptions of time are largely due to the different poetic movements they exemplify.
Degree
Ph.D.
Subject Area
Literature|Romance literature
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