eath. There may be connections in this way, but they alone will not explain the occasion of Lorca's execution. Mysticism may construct a mythology, but it doesn't offer concrete evidence. One must look elsewhere if one is to find such connections, and, when one does so, evidence that Lorca's work had a direct impact on his early death presents itself. The evidence does not present itself from a mystical perspective. His death obsession is tangential to the real causes of his execution. Evidence for a connection between his work and his death can be found in the pedestrian world of politics.
The Spanish Civil War pitted the Nationalist forces of Francisco Franco against Loyalist and liberal forces. Lorca had never taken an express position regarding the two parties. However, his work had been coopted by Loyalist supporters, and he was peripherally associated with their cause. Ramon Ruiz Alonso, a poet and ex-deputy in the Confederacion Espanola del Trabajo, was assigned the task of arresting Lorca during a period of extreme oppression of leftist sympathizers and offered the following explanation of Lorca's detention: "In those circumstances, the poet--God rest him!--was, well, considerably disliked because, obviously, well, they used his plays, you know, in the worker's club" (Gibson 95). And so the arrest and execution of Lorca can be explained in a practical way: his natural sympathies for his homeland led to his martyrdom for the Republican cause. Yet the irony of such a death-obsessed poet, a poet who had spoken of his own early death many times in his work, is inescapable. Examination of his poems for the purpose of illuminating his death fixation may be useful in understanding the poet's death. The poems may not be premonitions, but they can be seen as reflective of an attraction to death, an attraction that culminates in life imitating art. Whether this imitation received the participation of Lorca is debatable, but the fact r...