On Directness 

“… Throughout there are unabashed exclamations of emotion, ‘telling’ phrases and direct statements often baldly abstract (“today I feel sadness for you,/sadness of love”).  This directness and fearless use of abstraction, along with Antonio Machado’s clarity, challenges cherished tenets of Anglo-American poetry originating in the twentieth century, as well as the whole Chinese tradition of indirection that was central to Imagism.  Machado’s poems are like Imagism without open-endedness, without the need for a symbol or “objective correlative” to be interpreted.  His poems say what they say without sacrificing the unsaid. Poetry needn’t be difficult.”

“Our Aesthetes,” review of Eighty Poems of Antonio Machado