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EXCERPT FROM THE METAPHYSICS OF JUAN DE MAIRENA IN ANTONIO MACHADO’S APOCRYPHAL SONGBOOK Mairena: So, my dear Meneses, what do you foresee for the future of lyric poetry? Meneses: Soon the poet will have no choice but to put away his lyre and devote himself to other things. Mairena: Do you think so?... Meneses: I am talking about the lyric poet. Individual feeling, better still: the individual core of feeling, which is in every man’s heart, is starting to lose its appeal, and it will continue to do so. From the Romantic decline to our own times (the age of symbolism), modern lyric poetry has become a somewhat excessive luxury of Manchester man, of bourgeois individualism, based on private property. The poet parades his heart with the boastfulness of the newly wealthy man flaunting his mansions, his carriages, his horses, and his mistresses. The poet’s heart, so rich in tones, is almost an insult to the tone-deaf ear of the masses who are enslaved by mechanical labor. Lyric poetry always originates in the central area of the psyche, which is where feelings are located. There is no true poetry without feeling. But feeling must be general as well as individual, because even though there is no such thing as a generic heart that feels on everyone’s behalf, and each man carries his own heart and feels with it, all feeling is directed at values that are, or aspire to be, universal. When the radius of feeling is reduced and confined to the isolated, bounded self, off-limits to others, it becomes impoverished and ends up ringing false. Such is bourgeois feeling, a failure, it seems to me; such is the result of romantic sentimentalism. Ultimately, there is no true feeling without sympathy; mere sentiment does not have a heartfelt function, or an aesthetic one. A solitary heart—as someone or other said, Mr. Platitude perhaps—is not a heart; because no one feels anything unless he feels with another, with others... why not with everyone? Mairena: With everyone! Careful, Meneses! Meneses: Yes, I understand. Like a good bourgeois, you believe in the myth of the elite, which is the most plebeian myth of all. You are a snob.
