The Art & Death of Lorca
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The writer's art is generally a process of transforming the foundational substance of one's life into written language. A causal relationship, then, can easily be established between exterior events in a writer's life and subsequent works that follow. However, Drawing conclusions regarding a writer's work and events that follow is not an easy process. A critic must avoid creating causal relationships out of coincidental ones. To do so may create a fascinating mythology for an author, but it also risks facile analysis. Creating non-existent connections is shoddy criticism. In the case of the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, the temptation to infer causality is nearly irresistable. His body of work is utterly saturated with images of violent and brutal death. It examines death from numerous angles, as well as exploring the implications of death and what follows. Death appears imagistically, symbolically and overtly in literally dozens of his poems. Death is, above all other themes, Lorca's grand obsession. Therefore, when one learns of Lorca's death at the hands of a firing squad during the Spanish Civil War in 1936, one's first critical impulse is to draw a transcendent relationship between the theme of death and the actuality of death. Lorca sought death in his poetry throughout his career, so the analysis would go, and therefore death sought him. Such analysis would illustrate a keen example of tragic irony and an obvious fulfillment of a death wish. The flaw in this
. . .
o Garcia
Call the Guardia Civil!
Already my waist is snapped
like a stalk of maize (Lorca, "The Death of Antonito" 79).
Calling this a premonition might be too strong, but certainly it is an indication that Lorca identified with Antonito, not merely in his not-so-subtly hidden homosexuality, but in his sudden and violent death at the hands of governmental authorities. Lorca appears to be convinced of his death, a conviction that would appear hollow and melodramatic had Lorca lived on. That he did not adds an otherworldliness to the poem: a strangeness that is the substance of grandeur.
Coincidences aside, Gypsy Ballads is a series of poems in which the blood of martyrdom and the hot blood of sexual passion play equal roles. Through his rustic exploration of graphic imagery, Lorca carefully delineates his thematic concerns. He constructs a mythology of Andalusian life and, in doing so, creates a mythology of the poet himself: "Almost all the ballads end in real or psychic death, with no alleviation offered or expected. As a result, Lorca has been cast as a poeta maldito, a poet who accepts life as accursed" (Cobb, Contemp. Spanish Poets 106).
Poet in New York is a book of 10 thematically related chapters of poetry
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Approximate Word count = 3177
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)
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