Themes and Stages in Federico García Lorca’s Poetry
Federico García Lorca: Common Themes and Poetry
Common Themes
García Lorca’s work presents a framework where common themes are intertwined. Alongside love, the most prominent themes are frustration and tragic destiny. His works feature many marginalized individuals navigating a hostile world. This frustration is projected on two levels: the ontological and social, the metaphysical and historical. These two planes, as seen in Poet in New York, are often interconnected.
Poetry: First Stage
In Lorca’s poetic production, we can identify a first stage, lasting until 1928, encompassing works like Book of Poetry, Poem of the Cante Flamenco, Songs, Gypsy Ballads, Suites, Odes, and Poems in Prose. In most of these works, we are struck by the rare perfection with which he combines traditional and popular elements with more innovative and avant-garde ones.
With Poem of the Cante Flamenco, Lorca deviates from the expression of intimacy, already dominant in Book of Poems and Suites, and recreates, in an attempt to reach the depths of popular feeling, the Andalusian Gypsy world. All the historical and existential frustration present in this song is admirably captured by the poet.
In terms of metrics, as befits poetry rooted in the popular, assonant rhyme and short verses dominate. Also notable are the proverbial plasticity, the highly original metaphorical language, the symbolism, and the stylization of the world he describes.
The irrationalism that prevailed in some poems and songs will intensify in Gypsy Ballads and Poet in New York. The reader receives suggestions, insights, which will not always find a logical explanation.
In Gypsy Ballads, Lorca exalts the dignity of the marginalized and persecuted Gypsy race. As an antagonist, the Civil Guard appears, usually marked with negative connotations. It should be noted, however, that Lorca avoids the picturesque and colorful aspects of Gypsy life and points to the deeper aspects of these elements.
These elements can be analyzed and discussed separately:
- The issues that come from tradition: the drama of the themes (violence, sensuality, eroticism, mystery), the density of expression, and the metrics. Lorca elevates to a supreme artistic level, in both his lyrical, romantic, and dramatic works, a long tradition of strophic form, the romance, somewhat tarnished by this time.
- Language (especially regarding metaphors and adjectives): always with a boldness unknown in traditional poetry.
Second Stage
With Poet in New York (1929-1930), a marked change occurs in Lorca’s work. As always, the poet is influenced by the world around him, but, aware that poetic communication can never be conducted with realistic methods, he abandons a chronicle of his journey and the world undergoes a transformation process. The city, like Andalusia before, is seen from the outside.
Although strongly related, the following aspects should be considered for the study of the poems in this book:
- First, the negative view that the poet gives us of the city and its different areas (Wall Street, Bronx, Coney Island, Brooklyn Bridge, Harlem, streets, lights, the crowd), and his rejection of a mechanized civilization that destroys what is authentically human. The original meaning of the book could be summarized as follows: Man has created a huge city, but at the same time, is a victim of it, because it destroys his freedom and contact with nature and his communication with other men. In this dehumanized world, Black people, to whom he dedicates a section of the book, are one of the worst affected.
- From the reality he describes, Lorca returns in the first person, to himself, to his bitter past and present experiences, to love, solitude, and desires (note that in the title of the book there is a fusion of the external and the personal). The close relationship between the poet’s painful situation and the “pathetic symbol of New York” is perhaps the most significant aspect of this book. Lorca abandons the shame he has maintained so far and, from Poet in New York onwards, will express himself more openly in his poems. According to his confession, his is already “a poetry that opens its veins.”
- He will use the third person, usually in the plural, to launch his protest against those who thwart the full realization of all human instincts and in solidarity with those who, like him, suffer from indifference. Note that by often depriving the city of precise contours, through “derealizations,” he creates an impersonal microcosm, an abstraction without a precise place or time, a symbol of suffering and lack of harmony and solidarity in the universe. New York is a city dominated, like the rest of the world, by death, both physical and psychological, because there is no love. With the arrival in Havana, described in the final poems, Lorca returns to reunite with his Latin roots, almost lost during the American experience.