Federico García Lorca Biography
Federico García Lorca was the Kurt Cobain of early-twentieth-century literature. Misunderstood, depressive, and dead at far too young an age, he remains an important and tragic figure in Spanish drama and poetry. Lorca was part of a group of artists and poets known as the Generation of ’27, whose defining aesthetic remains difficult to grasp in part because of the diversity of its membership. What ultimately united the group, however, was a focus on the avant-garde and a rejection of traditional forms of expression, both of which Lorca incorporated into his writing. Along with his dark and haunting love sonnets, Lorca’s most enduring work is a trilogy of “rural tragedies”: Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba. The third play, which allegorizes and criticizes dictatorial rule, was not performed for nearly a decade after his death.
Facts and Trivia
- Lorca was part of an artistic circle of some of the most influential and creative thinkers of early-twentieth-century Spain, including Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí.
- Lorca’s first play, The Butterfly’s Evil Spell, was a symbolist work that depicted the thwarted love affair between a butterfly and a cockroach.
- A gay man in a climate of extreme intolerance, Lorca suffered from severe depression throughout his short life.
- Lorca’s works were banned or censored for almost four decades after his death. Only in the mid-1970s, after General Franco died, were Lorca’s works again published in his homeland.
- Lorca was executed at the young age of 38 at the onset of the Spanish Civil War. His body was never found.
Biography
Article abstract: García Lorca is celebrated as a poet and dramatist who was able to weave traditional and folk elements of Spanish literature and culture into highly imaginative and original works. His poems and dramas are replete with startling metaphors and images that are both personal and universal in their focus on life and death, sexual identity, and the conflicts of fantasy and reality.
Early Life
Federico García Lorca was born in rural Andalusia near the city of Granada. His father, Don Federico García, was a wealthy landowner. His mother, Vicenta Lorca, was a woman of artistic sentiments and a teacher who nurtured young García Lorca’s poetic sensibilities. Indeed, as a child, he entertained relatives and friends with his own puppet show dramas. Encouraged by his mother’s intense religious mysticism, the creative child took great delight in saying Mass for his family as if he were their priest.
By 1909, the family had moved to Granada, where García Lorca’s secondary education would take place. Though he had wanted to study music to become a composer, his practical father wanted his son to pursue a legal career. García Lorca was enrolled in the College of the Sacred Heart to prepare for such study at the University of Granada. At the college he was taught in the traditional Scholastic system of Saint Thomas Aquinas, which sought to merge intellectually the material with the spiritual. The young, thoughtful García Lorca, however, felt the clash between the medieval worldview of harmony portrayed in his formal studies and the modern world of enlightened scientific and social ideas then proliferating in Spain.
Graduating in 1914, García Lorca was enrolled in the University of Granada. While studying law there, he continued to pursue his interests in music and the rest of the liberal arts. By 1916, he was associating at cafés with fellow intellectuals and aesthetes who, like himself, found the everyday world in which they had to live boring, unimaginative, and, to use García Lorca’s own word, “putrefied.” During this period in his life, García Lorca was influenced by the respected musician Manuel de Falla, whose music was often characterized by its modern treatment of Spanish folk themes. He also became a follower of Don Fernando de los Ríos, who helped foster the modern intellectual, artistic, and political mood in Spain that challenged traditional values and authority.
Though he finally completed his law degree in 1923, in 1919 García Lorca moved to Madrid to study at the university there and lived in the Residencia de Estudiantes, a student residence that was a hotbed of radical, new thinking. While in Madrid, remarkable friendships with such literary figures as Menéndez Pidal, José Ortega y Gasset, and Juan Ramón Jiménez inspired in him a commitment to pursue a career as a writer. He also associated with the likes of Luis Buñuel, Pepín Bello, and perhaps most significantly, Salvador Dalí. Furthermore, he became a friend of Gregorio Martínez Sierra, a director of the Eslava Theater, who eventually produced Lorca’s first play.
Life’s Work
García Lorca’s first publication, Impresiones y paisajes (1918), a melancholy collection of lyrics describing his impressions of ancient Spanish life as it resonated in decaying churches and monasteries, and Libro de poemas (1921), poems composed before García Lorca’s Madrid experience, gained little attention outside his intellectual circle of friends. Though Canciones, 1921-1924 (1927; Songs, 1976) demonstrated García Lorca’s genius for merging traditional themes and images of Spain into contemporary modes of poetic expression, it was the publication of Romancero gitano (1928; The Gypsy Ballads of García Lorca , 1951, 1953) that brought him international attention. This...
(This entire section contains 2170 words.)
Unlock this Study Guide Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
book took more than five years to complete, and some have called it his finest single collection of poetry. In these poems, García Lorca incorporates the popular, rurally primitive spirit of Spain with the wildness and passion of his imagination. The gypsy culture provides the backdrop to the poet’s portrayal of the mystery of an alien society surviving in the dominant culture. Furthermore, he explores, with surprising metaphors and unusual word order, the existential and personal themes of dangerously repressed sexual instincts that are ever ready to erupt into the surface life, sometimes in the throes of violence and death. In fact, with haunting, lyrical beauty, the poems explore the full spectrum of sexual experience from the “normal” to the hidden impulses toward incest and homosexuality. The collection rightly brought García Lorca the title of “gypsy poet.”
By the 1930’s, while continuing to suffer emotional strife and bouts of depression, García Lorca turned his creative talents to the drama. With Bodas de sangre (1933; Blood Wedding, 1939), Yerma (1934; English translation, 1941), and later La casa de Bernarda Alba (1945; The House of Bernarda Alba, 1947), he created a dramatic trilogy that portrays characters struggling with their instinctual passions as well as their interlocking fates. Yerma, for example, is a tense drama concerning a woman’s obsession with her inability to have a child and her failure to achieve the love of her husband. It eventually ends in brutal violence with her murder of him. The House of Bernarda Alba starkly dramatizes the sexual frustrations of five sisters who, denied by their mother the freedom to express their sexuality, play out their elemental passions of lust and jealousy on the never-seen character of Pepe el Romano, the “male” in their world. Sexual rebellion, suicide, and bitter irony rage in the play.
All the plays are “social protest” in spirit, exploring the clash of inner feelings with the deadening demands of established social convention. As was the case with his poetry, the dramas also combine the real with the dream and provide García Lorca’s audience with a starkly Surrealist landscape bodied forth in strange, dynamically poetic language. Moreover, because of these plays’ concern with the classically elemental emotions of sex, love, hate, jealousy, and death, they have been compared to Greek tragedy.
This period also brought two fine books of poetry: Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías (1935; Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejás, 1937; also known as Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter) and Poeta en Nueva York (1940; Poet in New York, 1940, 1955). Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter is a long poem in four parts portraying the bullfighter as a modern existential hero ritualistically dueling Death. As the bullfighter faces the absurd void of Death, each figure ironically enhances the mysterious significance and dignity of the other in their lyrical engagement. Poet in New York (so radical as not to be published entirely until after the poet’s death) is García Lorca’s response to his experience of living in New York for a year in 1929. Suffering from emotional problems, at odds with his homosexuality, and on the verge of suicide, he traced in his poems the loneliness and despair inherent in a modern world characterized by a deadness of spirit and materialistic selfishness. The poems cry out for a spiritual renewal—an honesty and openness—and challenge the Christian church to reform and reincorporate spiritual passion into the contemporary world. They also call for the reinvigoration of a sense of personal destiny and aesthetic freedom as represented in the vision of the nineteenth century poetic revolutionary Walt Whitman. The poems are powerful, not only in their vivid glimpses of the universal horror of the modern landscape typified by city life (and the United States in particular), but also in the portrayal of the agony of the poet himself on his personal and artistic quest for a healing of his broken spirit.
In 1936, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, García Lorca returned to Granada, where, perhaps having offended the Nationalist forces of General Francisco Franco with his radical artistic voice, he was arrested and shot on August 16, 1936. The reasons surrounding his arrest and execution are still somewhat of a mystery.
Summary
Federico García Lorca is considered a writer of the first rank and is viewed by many to be Spain’s most significant twentieth century poet. His goal as a poet was to invigorate a stale language with startling new metaphors and images often ironically drawn from the traditional landscape of his homeland. In language that is lyrical, even mystical, García Lorca was able to portray ultimate passions that bespoke humankind’s ever-present primordial instincts—for García Lorca the ultimate realities. In his dramas, he was able to capture through stark, yet lyrical, visions the violent beauty of modern lives and their necessary connection to the primitive. In this regard, his work is a challenge to the static, the socially ordered and mechanized world of modern times. His poetry and drama are a calling forth of the subconscious truths that, finally, define our humanity at its fullest.
Miguel Hernández and Luis Cernuda are two Spanish poets on whom García Lorca had artistic influence, but his Surrealist manner did not enlist a wide following in his homeland. Such was not the case in Latin America, however, where the likes of Carlos Correa of Chile, Miguel Otero Silva of Venezuela, Jorge Zalamea of Colombia, and Manuel José Lira of Mexico all owe an artistic debt to Lorca. At his death at the age of thirty-eight, Federico García Lorca’s work characterized the best of the modern artistic spirit as it manifested itself in Spain.
Bibliography
Allen, Rupert C. The Symbolic World of Federico García Lorca. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1972. Allen focuses on García Lorca’s work from the point of view of relationships to modern (particularly Jungian) psychological theory and symbology.
Anderson, Reed. Federico García Lorca. London: Macmillan, 1984. Anderson’s study focuses on García Lorca’s dramatic art. The book has a fine overview of García Lorca’s relationship to Spanish literature in general as well as insightful discussions of the early as well as the mature dramas.
Binding, Paul. Lorca: The Gay Imagination. London: GMP Publishers, 1985. Binding’s is a fine study focusing on García Lorca’s work as it is an outgrowth of the poet’s homosexuality. Binding has a sympathetic sense of the modern temperament, and his readings, particularly of García Lorca’s mature works, are excellent.
Campbell, Roy. Lorca: An Appreciation of the Poetry. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1952. Campbell’s study concisely traces the growth of García Lorca’s poetic genius from his early regional works to his final publications. The book is replete with long passages of the poetry (in translation), making it useful to the beginning student of García Lorca’s work.
Cobb, Carl W. Federico García Lorca. New York: Twayne, 1967. Cobb’s is a fine basic chronological study of the poetry and drama containing not only good readings of the poetry and drama but also discussions of biographical and personal matters that influenced García Lorca’s work and career. Of interest, too, is a summary chapter highlighting García Lorca’s influence on other writers.
Edwards, Gwynne. Lorca: The Theatre Beneath the Sand. Boston: Marion Boyars, 1980. This is a solid study examining García Lorca’s career as a dramatist. Edwards’ readings of the plays, both major and minor, are not only insightful from a literary viewpoint but also convey a sense of the performance of the dramas; most chapters include details of performance histories.
García Lorca, Francisco. In the Green Morning: Memories of Federico. Translated by Christopher Maurer, with a prologue by Mario Hernández. New York: New Directions, 1986. This book is a beautiful reminiscence by García Lorca’s brother. It covers the brothers’ early life and influences as well as García Lorca’s engagement with the theater and dramatic art.
Gibson, Ian. The Assassination of Federico García Lorca. London: W. H. Allen, 1979. This excellent literary-historical study is devoted to solving the mystery surrounding García Lorca’s murder. It is a painstakingly researched account, fully convincing in its rendering of the political climate of Spain in the 1930’s and the artist’s place in it.
Gibson, Ian. Federico García Lorca: A Life. New York: Pantheon Books, 1989. Gibson’s biography is by far the fullest treatment of García Lorca’s life available in English. It includes a good selection of illustrations as well as extensive notes and an exceptionally ample bibliography.
Higginbotham, Virginia. The Comic Spirit of Federico García Lorca. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976. Unlike many critics, who tend to focus on García Lorca’s sense of the tragic, Higginbotham contends that the poet’s finest work is replete with the comic. Includes discussion of both drama and poetry.
Loughran, David K. Federico García Lorca: The Poetry of Limits. London: Tamesis Books, 1978. Longhran’s is one of the best discussions of García Lorca’s work written with a wide audience in mind. The poetry is rendered in English and explications serve as a fine introduction to the works.