Federico García Lorca’s Legacy: Poetry and Drama
Federico García Lorca: Poetry and Dramatic Work
Poetic Work
Two stages can be identified:
- Neopopulist Poetry (until 1928): His best-known poems are Poema del Cante Flamenco (1921), Songs (1921-1924), and Gypsy Ballads (1924-1927). These works feature typically Andalusian motifs, with Gypsy Ballads being the most famous. The themes are tragic, including violent death, frustration, and loneliness.
- Poetry of Surrealist Influence (since 1928): This includes Poet in New York, Lament for the Death of Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, and El Divan de Tamarit. The most important is the first, inspired by his trip to New York, where he experienced rootlessness, loneliness, and death. He turned to free verse, along with personal images and illogical metaphors, denoting a dark surrealist influence.
Drama
His theater reached a level of relevance nearly equal to his poetry. The relationship between them can be seen in several aspects: language, themes, and symbols. The language has a strong poetic dimension. The symbols belong to the magical realm of myth. The fundamental themes are death, frustration, and unfulfilled erotic love.
Poetry Under the Dictatorship: The Forties and Fifties
Blas de Otero
The Forties
This was not the best time for literature. Different currents appeared. A militant, heroic, and religious poetry emerged, pushed by the totalitarian regime. Examples include Escorial and Garcilaso. These poets, engaged with the new regime, were called “Garcilasistas.” The result was cold and evasive poetry. In the mid-forties, a second stream emerged, rehumanizing poetry around the Espadaña magazine. This inaugurated a realistic poetry committed to the existential and historical situation of man, as opposed to the Garcilaso current. A third current, related to the magazine Cántico, aimed to connect with the avant-garde and join the Generation of ’27.
The Fifties
Some critics have called this the first generation of postwar poets, including Carlos Bousoño, Blas de Otero, José Hierro, and Rafael Morales. The dominant themes in this decade are: a torn humanism, existential angst, and the drama of man in Spain. They created a realistic, social poetry, adjusted to the circumstances and supported by a colloquial language with moral content, expressing the social and political problems of Spain.
Blas de Otero
One of the most outstanding poets of the first postwar generation, his early poems from 1935 dealt with religious and love subjects, steeped in a strong Catholic faith. His works Ángel Fieramente Humano and Redoble de Conciencia speak of love, the mortal condition of man, anguish, and loneliness. He develops a struggle of love and rejection between two protagonists, God and the poet. This is described as his rehumanizing stage. His second stage, the social or historical stage, begins with Pido la Paz y la Palabra. It incorporates idioms and colloquial expressions, phonetic or word games. Sonnets disappear, and free verse predominates. His last stage includes a book of prose stories, Historias Fingidas y Verdaderas, and a book of poems, Mientras, which mixes collective and personal subjects as if he could not separate the aspects of his earlier work.
José Sanchis Sinisterra: Stages and Works
He is one of the playwrights who pays more attention to the ideological and aesthetic character of the text, with a subversive attitude towards the model of bourgeois comedy. He combines writing with stage direction and teaching. In 1977, he founded the Teatro Fronterizo group to investigate the frontiers of theatricality. His early compositions were influenced by Bertolt Brecht, Kafka, and, above all, Samuel Beckett. Ñaque o de Piojos y Actores, a great success, defines one of the most characteristic trends of the eighties: metatheater, a reflection on the theatrical device itself, its rules, and conditions. His works are routed to the analysis of political and social reality in ¡Ay, Carmela!, which was a resounding success. Its protagonists are a couple of artists performing in humble theaters. He wrote it for the 50th anniversary of Franco’s uprising, being critical and aiming to shock the conscience of the Spaniards. In 1992, he published his Trilogía Americana, consisting of El Retablo de El Dorado, Lope de Aguirre, Traidor, and Naufragios de Álvar Núñez. In 1994, he premiered El Cerco de Leningrado, a critique of reality.