The making of a poet-philosopher: Alterity and the Other in Antonio Machado's 'Proverbios y cantares'

This dissertation examines both the literary and philosophical concept of Other in Antonio Machado's Proverbios y cantares. By redefining Machado's pithy creations as distinct fragment poems, I insert them in a continuum of late eighteenth- through early twentieth-century poetic and metaphysical thought traceable to figures like Schlegel, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. I demonstrate that these fragment poems forge a distinct poetic-philosophical pensamiento in Machado's oeuvre that combines Spanish folklore with incisive meditative inquiries to create a more open poetry, one that explores those foundational concerns of the self and the Other as (un)knowable entities that hark back to late Enlightenment thinking. My study illuminates not only the pithy, gnomic vein oftentimes glossed over in Machado's poetic metaphysics, but it also provides key insights into why the Generation of 1898 broached the concept of the Other to tackle transcendental idealism and overcome nineteenth-century bourgeois solipsism and subjectivity.