Spanish · 1875–1939
Machado was born in Seville, raised in Madrid at the progressive Institución Libre de Enseñanza, and took a post teaching French in Soria, a poor Castilian town on the upper Duero, where he married Leonor Izquierdo when she was fifteen and he was thirty-four. She died of tuberculosis three years later and he never recovered; the poems he wrote about her afterwards are the plainest and hardest in modern Spanish. He moved to Baeza, then Segovia, then Madrid, invented two apocryphal philosopher-poets to argue with himself in print, and supported the Republic openly. In January 1939 he crossed the Pyrenees on foot with his mother among the refugees of the retreat, and died in Collioure, on the French side, a month later. His mother died three days after him. The line about the road being made by walking is his.