Lorca: A Collection of Critical Essays

It is curious and significant that we find it still difficult to see Lorca clearly, to analyze in detail his personality and the meaning of his Creative work. (Even the photographs that remain of him have a certain fuzzy quality.) Symbol of Spain and of all things Spanish, compared to Lope de Vega by Dámaso Alonso because of his direct and profound understanding of the popular idiom, acclaimed outside Spain and in his own country as the embodiment of the Spanish spirit, he nevertheless could state a few days before his death that he was “a brother of all men” and that he detested the Spaniard who was only a Spaniard. The very Lorca who was said to be “the perfect Spaniard and who deemed it impossible to live outside the borders of his country stated in his magazine, Gallo, that his group acknowledged the influence of “Picasso, Gris, Ozenfant, Chirico, Joan Miró, Lipchitz, Brancusi, Arp, Le Corbusier, Reverdy, Tristan Tzara, Paul Eluard, Aragon, Robert Desnos, Jean Cocteau, Stravinsky, Maritain, Raynal, Zervos, André Breton, etc., etc.” This manifesto was signed by Dalí, Montanya and Gasch, but Lorca approved it; either he was well aware of international artistic trends or he “felt" them intuitively and by and large accepted them.