Lorca and Hernández: Poetic Drama, Love, and Loss
Lorca’s Total Performance
Federico García Lorca created a true poetic drama. In it, besides the word, music, dance, and art become increasingly important, shaping a total spectacle. Lorca’s dramatic production expresses profound problems of life and history through a language loaded with connotations.
First Dramas and Farces
His first plays are related to modern theater. The Curse of the Butterfly aligns with the conventions of verse drama and introduces the theme of the ideal of perfection. Mariana Pineda connects with historical drama in verse and portrays the idealistic and melodramatic life of a heroine executed for embroidering a liberal flag.
Lorca’s four farces develop the conflict arising from marriages of convenience between the old and the young. The playwright used popular forms of puppetry through farces for puppets: Tragicomedy of Don Cristobal and Rosita and Retablillo de Don Cristobal, influenced by Valle.
The farces for people consist of The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife and Belisa in the Garden.
Comedias Imposibles
Under the heading of “comedies impossible” are three comedies: Just Five Years Pass, The Public, and Untitled Comedy. They show the influence of surrealism. Lorca’s theater anticipates the breakdown of logic, spacetime, split personalities, and multiple interpretations.
Tragedies and Dramas
Lorca intended to write a “dramatic trilogy of the Spanish earth,” which includes Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba. Lorquian tragedies take place in rural environments where natural forces impose a tragic destiny. In these dramas, the plot is of little importance, there are few main characters, and they involve choirs.
Miguel Hernández’s Poetic Position
Miguel Hernández’s poetry was born in a process of transition, influenced by cutting-edge innovation and humanization. His position is intensely emotional, impregnated with profound human content, framed in verses of great formal perfection.
Themes in Hernández’s Poetry
His themes include love and eroticism, initially an unsatisfied desire, later love in its fullness, pain, and death. Personal and social experiences cause suffering, whose highest expression is death. War intensifies pain, with the absence of loved ones and the loss of hope. His position reflects a vitalism linked to love and solidarity. The future emerges as a major source of hope.
Poetic Career
In his poetic evolution, he incorporated diverse influences, both classical (Góngora, Garcilaso) and contemporary (Aleixandre and Neruda). His trajectory is marked by an ideological evolution.
First Stage (1933-1936)
This stage searches for his own poetic language. Perito en lunas, with 40 octaves, shows Gongorine and avant-garde influence, characterized by hermeticism. It contains a kind of riddle. El rayo que no cesa focuses on the theme of the impossibility of love due to moral patterns. This book of poems stands out for the perfection of its sonnets.
Second Stage (1937-1938)
The second phase of Miguel Hernández is influenced by Pablo Neruda and a commitment to reality. In this stage, classic stanzas alternate with long verses. During these years, he composed two books of poetry:
- Viento del pueblo: The need to understand the people and share their feelings through verses full of anger, anguish, and love. It addresses women, the land, and displaced people.
- El hombre acecha: It discovers love and the bloody nature of war, which dehumanizes man.
Last Poems
His last poems are Cancionero y romancero de ausencias, which revolves around the feeling of absence: the absence of his first son, the death of his second, and the absence of his wife, whom he cannot see. It also reflects the poet’s lack of freedom. He raises the banner of love as hope: the love of his son, which signifies the future, and the love of his wife, with whom he has reached affective and erotic fullness.