My first profound experience of Lorca – my first real contact – occurred as I leafed through a copy ofRomancero gitanoon a bench on Bristol’s Brandon Hill, the Cabot Tower looking down at me from above as the tower of the church upon the Sacramonte rose towards me from the pages of the poem ‘San Miguel (Granada)’.¹ The first two stanzas, in particular, were revelatory:

Se ven desde las barandas,

por el monte, monte,

monte, mulos y sombras de mulos

cargados de girasoles.

Sus ojos en las umbrías

se empañan de inmensa noche.

en los recodos del aire,

cruje la...

Sincerity is not a virtue of modern poets, at least not where it implies total surrender to the lyrical impulse, to the need, the desire, to speak earnestly of oneself, to speak genuinely and directly of one’s unique, personal experience, albeit in a language that is necessarily not unique to one’s person but belongs equally to other poets. Over the course of the nineteenth century and into the Twentieth, the movement of poets was increasingly away from speaking as men to other men.¹ ‘Poetry,’ Eliot concluded, ‘is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is...

‘Ya vengan del corazón de la sierra, ya vengan del naranjal sevillano o de las armoniosas costas mediterráneas, las coplas,’ explained Lorca in his lecture ‘El cante jondo. Primitivo canto andaluz’ (OC, III, pp. 195–222), ‘tienen un fondo común: el Amor y la Muerte …, pero un amor y una muerte vistos a través de la Sibila, ese personaje tan oriental, verdadera esfinge de Andalucía’ (OC, III, p. 205). To his references to the Sibyl and the Sphinx he then added riddles:

En el fondo de todos los poemas late la pregunta, pero la terrible pregunta que no tiene...

Canciones, published in 1927, contains many poems that are contemporaneous with the Suites. Written between 1921 and 1925 (see Walters 2002, p. 136), they head similarly in the direction of syntactical simplification and the eradication of emotionalism, ‘towards an aesthetic’, as Walters (2002, p. 137) puts it, ‘that implied economy, understatement, detachment’. This minimalist approach contributes, as it did in both the Suites andPoema del cante jondo, to the independent character of poems that privilege metaphor over discursiveness. There is, once again, a ludic aspect in all this, combined also with a double perspective characterized by Walters as the...

‘Childless couples, orphaned children, aborted childbirths, and unregenerately celibate men and women,’ writes Edward Said, ‘populate the world of high modernism with remarkable insistence, all of them suggesting the difficulties of filiation.’¹ For Said, ‘filiation’, as Abdirahman A. Hussein explains, ‘is premised on narrative linearity, familial procreation, biological succession, and the “vertical” transmission of traditionary authority. Said allegorizes it into the authority of an immediate community or specific culture to which one belongs “by birth, nationality, profession.”’² The difficulties of filiation that Said perceives in modernism constitute for him the first in a three-part pattern originating in this ‘large group...

Lorca’s series of poems collected under the titlePoeta en Nueva Yorkpresent the reader with an often harrowing condemnation of big city life and its alienating consequences.¹ Yet there is something disconcerting about this outsider’s attack on a city he knew relatively little about and in which he resided for less than a year (between June 1929 and March 1930) in circumstances that can only be described as comfortable. The anguished tones of Lorca’s New York poems are symptomatic, no doubt, of his outrage at the excesses and injustices of capitalist society – sentiments that are anticipated in his ‘Oda...

‘I’ve become a fashionable little boy,’ Lorca told his parents, ‘after my useful and advantageous trip to America’ (Stainton, p. 268). Indeed, our poet was much sought after upon his return to Spain. ‘Ahora,’ he wrote to his family from Madrid in October 1930, ‘todos los editores me acosan de tal manera que tengo que ir a Granada para recoger todas mis cosas, absolutamente todas, y publicarlas’ (EC, p. 695). ‘Aquí soy el de siempre,’ he added, ‘cada vez más temido, pero con una enorme influencia y un número fuerte de amigos, mucho más de lo que yo creía.’ His...