Entre el modernismo y la modernidad: La poesia de Manuel Machado (Alma y Caprichos). By Rafael Alarcon Sierra. Spain: Diputacion de Sevilla, 1999. 602 pages. The of Manuel Machado has been the subject of increasingly positive recognition and critical attention both by Spanish poets of the 1980s and by literary critics in the 1980s and 1990s. In this reawakening of interest in one of the best modernist poets of his day, Rafael Alarc6n Sierra has been prominent in the past decade and is already well known to us for his several first-rate articles in Insula, and also in Quimera and in Hispanic Review, as well as his splendid editions of both Manuel Machado's Caprichos, El Mal Poema (Madrid: Castalia, 2000) and prose, Impresiones, El Modernismo: Articulos, cr6nicas y resenas (1899-1909), (Valencia: PreTextos, 2000). Now he has provided us with a monumental study of two of the poet's most important early works (Alma and Caprichos), and, in the process of this illuminating investigation, he both broadens and deepens our insight into important aspects of the symbolist modernist movement in general. This study is based upon the thesis, superbly and convincingly argued, that in a very few years Manuel Machado became a central figure of the most genuine current of symbolist modernism, with the publications of Alma (1902) and Caprichos (1905), and that, therefore, he is an indispensable figure for understanding the development and evolution of the modern tradition in twentieth-century Spanish poetry. His early work is likewise seen to be crucial for understanding the essential character of symbolist modernism. Noteworthy is the very scholarly knowledge and understanding of the origins of fin-de-siecle Spanish in European romanticism and, most importantly, in French symbolism and Latin American modernism, which permits the author of this study to identify very precisely the particular modalities of Machado's symbolism, whether romantico-simbolista, parnasiano-simbolista, romancillo ligero y popularista, or simbolistadecadente. Rafael Alarcon Sierra, through painstaking research, situates the of Manuel Machado always within its historical, literary, and biographical context, documents abundantly the tradition of themes, motifs, and poetic forms from which it emerges, analyzes meticulously its process of gestation, identifies its originality, and shows how it points ahead to the future development of the poet's creative work as well as to twentiethcentury Spanish lyric in general. This book is divided into five chapters: 1. Hacia el Alma de Manuel Machado (1874-1902), 2. cetro y simbolo finisecular (y el ejemplo de Manuel Machado), 3. Analisis de Alma, 4. Hacia Capri chos (1902-1905), and 5. Analisis de Caprichos. During the course of these chapters, we find the most complete and best documented account yet of the poet's life from the year of his birth, 1874, to the publication of Caprichos in 1905: his years in Madrid, Seville, and Paris, his friendships, his daily life in cafes, tertulias, and nightclubs, and his participation in journals and literary polemics of the time, in defense of the poetry and of new aesthetic ideals. Alarcon Sierra's analysis of Alma and Caprichos, the poetic composition and structure of each, the various subsections that comprise each, the many masks and disguises adopted by the poetic personality in its quest for identity, constitutes by far the best treatment yet of these complex works. …