The Landscape Poetry of Antonio Machado: A Dialogical Study of Campos de Castilla (review)

314 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies ción de los escritos, es decir, las circunstancias de lugar y tiempo que rodearon su publicación, incluso con algún comenrario sobre los periódicos o revistas donde se publicaron. Esta exhaustiva recopilación incluye tambi én una sección de "Anexos," una extensa y completa sección de "Referencias bibliográficas" y un "Ã-ndice de nombres." Con esta edición se da un paso más allá en el camino hacia el total compendio de los escritos machadianos, aunque son muchos todavÃ-a los manuscritos y borradores cuyo paradero se desconoce, y es posible también que haya aún más de una colaboración suya en la prensa de ámbito nacional por salir a la luz. Prosas dispersas (1893-1936) es material obligado en la biblioteca de todo aquel inteiesado en cualquiei aspeao de la vida y obia de Antonio Machado. Nuria Morgado The University of Arizona The Landscape Poetry of Antonio Machado: A DialogicalStudy ofCampos de Castilla The Edwin Mellen Press, 2001 By Kevin Krogh Most of the criticism written about Antonio Machado's lyrical work studies die poet's particular vision of the political issues that preoccupied his generation: namely, how to bring Spain into the modern world. There is also a substantial amount of criticism that focuses on the intimate, where his poetry mimes the interior dimensions of his life. Other scholars utilize both approaches, the generational and the biographical, in order to interpret the meaning of his poetic expression. However, what we have in this dialogical study of Campos de Castilk, is an assessment of his landscape poetry as an act of communication that centers critical emphasis on the relationship between Machado's poetry and his reader. To achieve this purpose, chapter one, "Landscape Poetry and the Collective Cultural Consciousness ," fust examines the notions of lyric poetry and landscape, and defends the reality of a Castilian collective cultural landscape consciousness , or a state of mind, characterized by similarities of sensation, emotion, volition, and thought between the writer and the intended audience. As die author points out, this collective cultural and sensory consciousness of a group of people is what gives language its dialogical natuie, "and it is the dialogical natuie of Machado's landscape poetiy that accoids it its tremendous appeal to its Spanish audience." Machado has the ability to communicate to his audience that which they already know and feel. Campos de Castilk centers on the landscape of Castile as the geographical and the spirirual heart and soul of Spain, so that it not only communicates a quintessential Castilian collective experience, but also by extension expresses a quintessential Spanish collective experience. Chapter two, "Perceptual Poetry and Dialogism ," explores the poetic language of Machado's poems with reference to sensory perception and examines as well the dialogic nature of this perceptual based poetry through close readings of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer's "En la imponente nave" and Machado's "El limonero lánguido suspende." To explain diis "perceptual based poetry," the author talks about the poet's ability to convey feelings by exploiting the dialogism of die word which will recall concrete sensations already experienced and stored in the memory of the reader. This is what Immanuel Kant called "the manifold of sensation ," where raw dara is collected and oiganized by the mind through the power of sensibility. Those sensations are formed into concepts, or general conceptual categories rhat can be recalled from rhe manifold of sensation when the reader encounters poetic words. In Chapter three, "Perceptual Landscape Connectives Between Poem and Readei: 'Campos de Soria (CXIII),'" Kevin Krogh explains that it is the landscape of Castile that connects the act of reading to the reader's own sensory experience with theif environment. The authoi affirms that in much of Machado's poetry, "it is the reader's shared consciousness of rhe Castilian landscape which provides the sensory referent or the perceptual connective between the poem and the empirical sensory experience of the reader." The relationships between a poem's perceptual landscape context and the conceptual development ofthat Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 315 context is explored through a close reading of "Campos...