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 line of inquiry is that numerous death-obsessed writers led long, productive lives. That Shakespeare wrote King Lear does not imply that Shakespeare saw himself as a ruler destined to lose his kingdom. That Lorca searched for death in his poetry and plays is unmistakable. That death searched for him is problematical and nearly fantastic.
The reader cannot, then, look to supernatural mechanisms for an explanation of the connection between Lorca's work and his d...