Soria, city of Poets
Poetry Awards "Leonor" and "Gerardo Diego" Soria Provincial Council convenes every year, and the City Council organizes the book fair "EXPOESÍA" in August, and works both institutions with the Antonio Machado Foundation. Also note is the House of Poets in the Casino Amistad-Numancia.
Antonio Machado, on October 5, 1932, next to the steps of the chapel of San Saturio, said: "Soria is a city for poets. Because the language of Castile, the imperial language of all the Spains, seems to have its own and cleaner source. Gustavo Adolfo Becquer, that poet without rhetoric, that pure lyrical, must love her as much as his native Seville; perhaps more, which in admirable Toledo. A poet of the Asturias, Santillana, Gerardo Diego, began to sing in romance again at the gates of Soria: "Duero River Duero / river nobody to go with low / no one stops to hear / your eternal verse of water."
In turn Gerardo Diego, in the first stanza of his poem "If I were a poet" (1923) expresses the dreamy character that Soria had for him, Bécquer and Antonio Machado:
"Andalusian Poets
that dreamed in Soria an extended dream:
Becquer you, and you, Antonio, good Antonio Machado,
you found here the love and uploaded the crosses
of pain and death. From the Cantabrian Sea
Also as you i came to Soria to Dream ... "
