Antonio Machado

Campos de Castilla, published in 1912, uses the Castilian landscape to think about memory, grief, and Spain's national condition. It is one of the defining books of the Generation of 1898.

Machado lived and taught in Soria, and the region's landscape shaped many poems in Campos de Castilla. His marriage to Leonor Izquierdo, who died young in 1912, also deepened the personal grief in those poems.

Machado supported the Spanish Republic and fled Spain near the end of the Civil War. He died in Collioure, France, in 1939.

Machado's mature poems often use plain language, walking imagery, and Castilian landscapes rather than decorative effects. That restraint is especially visible in Campos de Castilla.