With reference to the poems of Antonio Machado, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Federico García Lorcas tudied in the course, discuss the uses of poetry and the ways in which the three writers exploit this medium.

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SPPO1120 – modern writing

Louise Maddison

Student No. 020-861-829

With reference to the poems of Antonio Machado, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Federico García Lorca studied in the course, discuss the uses of poetry and the ways in which the three writers exploit this medium

Poetry is a vast genre of literature that is used to express emotions, feelings and ideas.  Every writer has different reasons for expressing their ideas through this medium.  Antonio Machado, Juan Ramón Jiménez and Federico García Lorca were all Spanish poets who lived around the same era.  Does this mean their uses of poetry were the same?  Did they write poems for the same reasons?  In order to discuss how they have used poetry it is necessary to understand their poems in more detail.

        

At first glance it seems that Antonio Machado explores nature and the beauty of it in his poetry.  In his poem Crepúsculo Machado describes a nature scene.  Although he doesn’t use the first person, it is clear from the content that the poem is implicitly about him.  He has therefore, used nature to mirror himself.  The cold images of stone and marble in the poem, like the statue of Cupid, communicate a lack of expression on the poet’s part.  With Cupid having connotations of love and with the statue being constructed from stone it is possible to say that Machado finds it difficult to express love.  Antonio Machado, in this respect, has exploited the medium, with nature as a main theme, to reflect himself to the reader.  In displaying his lack of love through poetry, he is able to get across exactly what he wants to say by emphasising aspects with repetition, rhyme and other stylistic features.  Writing his feelings in prose, for Machado, would not have had the same effect.

Another example of Machado using nature to describe himself is in his poem A Un Olmo Seco.  He fears that his life is near to its end like that of the tree and he only has hope left.  Here, Machado is using poetry to express anxiety and concern about the ending of his life.  The descriptions which he writes about the tree are descriptions of how he sees himself in relation to life in general.  In this way, he is using poetry to put across his worries and to tell people about how he sees himself in comparison to nature.

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Machado’s poem El Limonero, however, is not, on the surface, a description about nature but a search for something.  The poet tries to recall an innocent childhood illusion in which he attempted to pick up some fruit out of some water and then discovered that it was merely a reflection.  Machado communicates the difficulty in finding the illusion he remembers from childhood, with a contrast between heart and mind –he knows he won’t find it again but he still has hopes.  This can be related to A Un Olmo Seco when he hopes for another ‘milagro de primavera’ (miracle of ...

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