Antonio Machado, the Republican poet of the people in the 1930s, born in 1875 and therefore a contemporary of President Manuel Azaña, was requested in September 1938 to comment over wartime national radio on the thirteen-point programme for peace devised by the prime minister, Juan Negrín, the consummate political pragmatist of the 1930s, born in 1892, the same year as Francisco Franco. Machado's words were prophetic, pronounced just a few months before his death in exile in February 1939 and the Republic’s defeat. The apoliticism before 1936 to which he referred in 1938 had been based on republicanism's intellectual bent and Machado's own tacit rejection of Spanish politics, his civic critique of a political life which he perceived as revolving around mere clientelism and the naked struggle for power rather than consent. Machado's creative sense of what politics ought to be would make his ideas important again in the 1970s, during the expansion of civil society which accompanied post-Franco democratisation, but as the war drew to an end he could only regret bitterly that the country had proved to be ‘a land of lamentable negligence’, of political failure, leading to catastrophe.