2. Book of poems

The “Words of Justification” Lorca offers at the opening of the book make this same point:

I offer in this book, which is all youthful ardour and torture and boundless ambition, the true image of my adolescence and youth, those days that connect the present moment to my recent childhood itself . . . In these disorganized pages lies the faithful reflection of my heart and my spirit . . . Above and beyond its flaws, its undoubted limitations, this work has the virtue, among many others that I would note, of reminding me at all times of my passionate childhood spent running naked through the meadows of the Vega, against a backcloth of mountains. (I, 59)

The proximity of his childhood enables him not only to play around with the recent memories that immediately come to mind, but also to highlight the contradictions and his sorrow at what is now lost to him. The voice of the book’s protagonist presents itself as a reality in crisis, and there are even allusions to physical defects in these negative confessions: “Was it not because of my downcast countenance? / Oh my walk, so ungainly!” (I, 96).

 It is this awareness of reality that looks back with melancholy on a lost childhood, on that naked little boy with all the innocence of Adam who ran free through the Vega. The image of the natural spring as a pure source, the appearance of children’s playful nursery rhymes, and the natural elements of a happy and fertile life contrast sharply with the discovery of limits, of the darker side of life. Lorca’s lyrical digressions tend to centre on the contradictions of the heart, the questioning of religious faith, troublesome sexuality, impossible love, the anguish of death, the passing of time, and that autumnal sadness about those things that fade away, never to return. The inevitable lucidity of consciousness dampens the desire that shines down like sun across the fields.

This is a rural book, a peasant book, in the best sense of the word, because its predominant tone of nostalgia is blended with a very particular culture that is passed from generation to generation. Here, by tradition, people aspire to achieve harmony with nature, and the smallest elements (insects, little details of the acequia irrigation channels, changes in colour or fragrance) merge with the infinite panoramas of starry nights and transcendental aspirations. This rural setting lends itself to the story passed down from far-away forbears, legends recounted round the heat of the campfire, tales told in children’s dance, the human story that repeats over and over like a cycle or song chorus. And beyond all the possibilities the author offers us to recreate a childhood memory, he also sets the scene for other elements.

The melancholy associated with the passage of time and a world now lost strikes a tone that lends itself to insisting on the cycles that repeat, beyond the limitations of existence. Human beings disappear with every turn of the planet. The narration keeps alive the memory of that which the hours seek to undo. Lorca’s elegy is that of nature. There is harmony and constant symbolic appropriation: “I write your eulogy, / Which is mine” (I, 146). But the pantheistic perspective reveals the limited nature of the human outlook, because from that outlook a desire for regeneration after the autumn and the deadly winter is simply inconceivable. Human beings seem obliged to accept the irremediable:

Lady Death, wizened,
Meanders through the willow groves
With her absurd cortege
Of illogical illusions.
(I, 149)

The ironic tone diminishes some of the poignancy of the statement, but not its importance. The entourage of illusions that drags on behind death is absurd, when reason shows quite clearly that we are doomed to die. Humour appears as an element that provides stability in the bridges that stretch between innocence and lucidity, as it has one foot firmly in child-like joy and another in mature consciousness that brings a certain irony and curbs the passions of reality. In this book, the young poet grows accustomed to approaching the most serious issues with humour and with a poetic strategy that manages to maintain—in the midst of the conflict—bonds with lost innocence. El Viejo Lagarto (The Old Lizard) may have romantic notions of being a poet for having studied a book by Lamartine, but he also sports the “grand double chin of a Christian archbishop” (I, 132).

If we compare the Libro de Poemas with other works among his earliest writings, we might discern a possible selection criterion: the desire to make his references to erudite cultural figures and their lived experiences more nuanced when relating them to the sentimental content of each composition. Prestigious figures and names abound in the book—literary personalities and classical and Christian mythology. Above all, we find characters that embody a certain rebellion or sentimental break from the world: don Quixote, Cyrano, Queen Joanna the Mad, Juliet, Héloïse, Christ, Faust . . . literary culture continues to represent a fundamental source of support for our poet, as he faces the challenge of revealing his private world. But these selected compositions already begin to hint at a lyrical dexterity that enables him to reach far beyond a simple biographical outlet dressed up as erudition and achieve a lyrical truth with aesthetic value. His personal recollection of children’s songs intensifies when he draws on the resources of ‘neopopularism’—animals powerfully convey their symbolic meaning, and the music is used more convincingly. 

The work draws on a romance style—“Listen to the ballads / Of the water in the poplar groves” (I, 80)—that aspires to the gentle music of assonance and matures toward the symbolism of Antonio Machado and Juan Ramón Jiménez, although at times it conveys Rubén and the solemnity of the long verses:

The harrowing nostalgia for a wasted life,
The dreadful feeling of being born too late,
Or the restless hope for an impossible tomorrow
With the encroaching unease of the flesh’s ache.
(I, 83)

Between 1919 and 1920, marked by his entry into the Residencia de Estudiantes (a unique intellectual and cultural institution of the time) and his introduction to Madrid’s literary scene, Lorca’s learning and knowledge went from strength to strength. Following his initial contact with Juan Ramón Jiménez, to whom he was introduced via a letter of presentation from Fernando de los Ríos, the young poet also took his first steps toward emerging trends such as ultraism, the creationist metaphors of Huidobro, and the cerebral lucubrations of Cubist poetry. He started to form bonds with a group of friends who shared similar artistic interests. In the Residencia, for instance, he met Emilio Prados, to whom he referred as “cazador de nubes” (cloud-hunter) in the dedication of his 1920 poem La Balada del Agua del Mar (Seawater Ballad). Friendship, cemented by a shared sense of the aesthetic, characterized his meaningful relationships with Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, Rafael Alberti, Jorge Guillén, and Pedro Salinas.

One of his reasons for publishing the Libro de Poemas was the desire to draw a line under a past phase, having discovered a different kind of poetics with his new friends—and this was soon to leave a mark on his own writing. From this point on, he endeavoured to gradually move beyond modernism and even beyond the romantic tradition. Hence, the asseverating, conceptual verse he began to produce—verse crafted with great intelligence.

Gradually, his efforts to achieve conciseness, which he had talked of in his letter to Juan Ramón Jiménez, began to bear fruit: the work of concept over sentimental meanderings. In the poems he wrote in 1920, we can discern his questioning of writing, which now brings with it new problems and challenges associated with the stylistic point of view.

One of the compositions in El Libro de Poemas is actually called Encrucijada (Crossroads), and it speaks to the different paths that open up when either the brain or the heart are stained with ink:

Oh what grief to have
Poetry in the far-off distance
Of passion, and my brain
All ink-stained!

Oh what grief not to wear
The fantasy garment
Of the happy man: my skin
—The sun’s carpet—tanned!
(I, 137)

This new poetic rationalism, much like Cubist painting, has the cheerful self-confidence characteristic of being able to neatly arrange outward reality according to reason—a level of control that seems far-removed from the romantic passion from whence García Lorca came. Where should the ink of his writing flow from? From his heart or his head? That was the question he was obliged to answer. The fact that the young poet and reader was perfectly aware of this crossroads is evident in the way he justifies his book and in his private statements to friends, above all Adolfo Salazar, who had reviewed the publication in El Sol—to the delight of Lorca and his family. In a letter dated 2 August 1921, he thanks Salazar for his public praise of the work and his personal support in privately pointing out some of its defects:

I totally agree with the things you find fault with in my book. There’s a lot more to criticise! . . . but I already knew that . . . the bad parts are obvious . . . I don’t recognize myself at all in this book, I’m lost among the dreadful fields of ‘the essay’, leading a heart full of tenderness and simplicity down the path of declamation, down the path of humour, down the path of indecision, until at last I think I have found a little lane, impossible to describe in words, full of daisies and lizards of every colour. (III, 716)

And so it was, that Lorca brought this era to a close. The solutions he found were to signal the beginning of his maturity as a poet and open the way to his most personal and recognizable world.