García Lorca

Lorca was neither a "political" nor a "surrealist" poet -- in whatever sense these terms are used nowadays. He was, however, a popular poet in that special sense reserved to Spain: a poet whose work is loved and acclaimed by the illiterate and the sophisticated alike for those immediately discernible characteristics through which the Spanish people identify themselves. And he was a difficult poet, in the modern phrase, because he attempted to create a personal idiom by relating his understanding of a folk world with the values of an industrial world. In this attempt, he adapted materials and techniques from sources as remote as the medieval Arabic poets and as recent as Breton and Dali. Yet to recognize his poetry alone is to omit his important dramatic work, for which poetry was, in one sense, a preparation. Poetic and dramatic both, his genius grew not out of advance-guard literary or political movements, but out of a richly functioning Spanish tradition barely surveyed by most present-day criticism. To approach him as an artist at all, one must realize the extent of his integration with that tradition, and understand the kind of sensibility able to thrive so well within it. Thus, in bringing Lorca's art to a focus, the following chapters will stress just such a double projection of traditional use and sensibility. - Preface.