Word: lorca
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...Spanish peasants and gypsies Lorca celebrates in his earlier, and later, poems live in a world dominated by death, a world of knifings, bullfights, bloody night raids by Franco's falangistas, but it is death as natural and unconsciously accepted as the moon, or eating, or being born. Their death is a positive force, a feature of the primitive existence of blood and earth they are part of. Death in modern society is by fear put out of mind, that is why the inescapable fact of it is so sordid. It is the difference between regenerate and unregenerate. The poet...
...state Lorca would have all return to is the condition that the Negroes and his gypsies share, that unabashed freedom of the instincts, the alignments with the primal emotions of all whose spirits are outside civilized society. To Lorca, these wooden people of the city are not merely estranged from a natural environment which they can reacquire by a turn in the park; the entirely of the mass of their mechanical civilization stands between them and the broken strands of their roots in Nature. They cannot operate naturally or seek the pronouncements of Nature, if they allow the city...
What made Lorca change from his popular combinations of the old romantic meter (the lines and construction in his Romancero Gitano are very like EI Cid) with inflamed Gongorisms from the seventeenth century and scenes from contemporary Andalusian life was not the influence of Dali's artistic personality, nor the surrealist attempts of his not-so-friendly literary rival Rafael Alberti. We must recognize now with the settling effects of two decades since Lorca's death, that he took on this radically different form only as a means to express his similarly different subject matter. It should be apparent that...
...change was necessary, and necessarily as it was. Lorca could only have put together poetical monstrosities if he had not refused to fit the turbulent, phantasmagorical sensations he took in, to the regulated, steady, time-proven forms he was used to. It is perhaps an easy task to fit a love lyric or an ingenuous little casida into the neat octosyllabic line, but that line would prove a Procrustes' bed to a poem titled Landscape of the Urinating Multitudes or the description of a Harlem Saturday night...
...Some of Lorca's poetry in Poet in New York is very bad, partly because of the strange idiom he was working in, partly on account of his often-expressed desire to say something, to picture something, in a completely new, and preferably shocking, way. It is not so much that his metaphors and imagery slip out of focus, as Roy Campbell suggests, but they are sometimes strained and absurdly disjunct, unsequential and incoherent. Some of his worst lines, such...