From the start, he conceived of poetry as music. When he read his poems to others, he drew his hands through the air, stretching and modulating individual lines of verse, playing “with a word as if it were an accordion,” a friend remembered. He did not commit himself to a rigorous study of metrics, but instead picked up the “mysteries of prosody” from conversations with his Rinconcillo friend José Montesinos, a scholar of literature. Lorca was timid about showing his poems to Montesinos and generally reluctant to publish his verse—not so much because he feared public disapproval but because he believed that poetry was first and foremost an oral art. When even close friends asked him for copies of his poems, he often turned them down.
He believed that “poetry” and “melancholy” belonged to the same “kingdom.” He said he could not conceive “of any kind of poetry but lyric.” Thematically, his first poems were indistinguishable from his prose. Throughout 1917 and 1918, Lorca’s verse dwelt on his ongoing, increasingly desperate search for love. Consumed by desire, he spoke of his “tragic weddings / without bride or altar.” He asked pointedly why “the roses that smell of woman / wither at my slow sob?” His poems suggest that by early 1918 Lorca was on the verge of an emotional breakdown. Sometime that spring Lorenzo Martínez Fuset complained that Lorca had become as “sensualized” as a mindless animal, and he begged him to cease his “amorous ravings.”
In late April 1918, a month short of his twentieth birthday, Federico wrote, “The spring of my life, / perhaps the last one …” The following month he again referred obliquely to suicide: “My life / wants to sink in the channel’s / sweet song.” He felt old beyond his years. His plump face was becoming more angular, and he had dark whiskers. He sensed life slipping inexorably through his grasp. “What a huge sorrow / it is to be young, but not to be!” he exclaimed.
Shortly after returning from Castile in the late summer of 1917, Lorca had announced to his family that he intended to bring out a book, and had asked his father to defray the costs of publication. His Rinconcillo friends endorsed the project, and immediately began offering advice. They urged Lorca to rid his writing of Professor Berrueta’s overblown romantic style, and Lorca complied, reworking various passages of his book to include negative remarks about art works that in Berrueta’s company he had once admired.
His father meanwhile debated the merits of publication. He cornered Lorca’s friend José Mora Guarnido on the street one night and demanded to know what the journalist thought of his son’s writing. “As I’m sure you’ll understand, I don’t mind wasting one or two thousand pesetas to give him the pleasure of publishing a book. It would cost me more if he asked for an automobile or something worse,” the landowner said, chewing on a cigar. “But I don’t want every idiot in Granada laughing at him because of the book.” He worried in particular that his cronies in the town casino would mock his son’s “little poems.” Mora assured him that Lorca’s book was worthy of publication.
Still skeptical, Don Federico consulted others: Professor Berrueta, Fernando de los Ríos, the editor of the local newspaper, Lorca’s grade school teacher. All agreed that Lorca had talent and deserved a chance. In the end, his father yielded. Arrangements were made with a local press to print the book, and Lorca began assembling a manuscript. The work he had originally envisioned, however, an assortment of essays culled from the material he’d written while traveling with Berrueta, was too sparse. To pad the book he dashed off several additional impressions of Granada as well as a series of lyrical “Themes,” some of which he extracted from his prose meditations. By the time he delivered his first chapters to the printer in late 1917 or early 1918, Lorca was still rushing to complete his manuscript.
He gave a public reading from his forthcoming book at the Granada Arts Center on March 17, 1918. Two weeks later he received his first bound copy of Impressions and Landscapes, as he had chosen to title the book. The next day he began signing copies for family and friends. He approached the task with gravity. “To my great friend Antonio, delicate and sentimental, who dreams with his flesh overflowing in another, distant flesh,” read one of his more opulent inscriptions.
Impressions and Landscapes received two local reviews. Aureliano del Castillo, of the Defensor de Granada, hailed the book’s skill and sincerity, despite its syntactical errors and what del Castillo called its “unnecessary trivialities.” Luis de Luna, of the literary journal El Exito, termed the work a “portrait of the artist, with his desires, his anathemas, his aspirations, and his dreams of Art and Poetry.” Luna, who knew Lorca personally, described him as a man so deeply preoccupied with life’s graver issues that he often neglected to “comb his hair and knot his tie.”
Like its author, Impressions and Landscapes was rambling and unkempt. Grammatical, syntactical, and punctuation errors littered the text. The narrative itself consists of a loosely structured sequence of travel essays followed by a series of random prose meditations. The book’s cover, an art nouveau illustration designed by Ismael Gomez de la Serna, one of Lorca’s Rinconcillo friends, shows a framed painting of a landscape beside a floor lamp and a spider’s web. The image suggests the work’s prevailing motif: the Spanish landscape, illuminated by the author’s soul and ravaged by time. But the book’s underlying subject is art. Where does it exist? How is it made? What comprises it? Building on ideas he had set forth the previous summer in “Rules in Music,” Lorca argues in Impressions and Landscapes for an art derived from the soul and founded on personal sentiment. “Poetry exists in all things, in the ugly, in the beautiful, in the repugnant,” he advises in the book’s prologue. “The difficult thing is knowing how to discover it, how to awaken the deep wells of the soul.”
From both Domínguez Berrueta and the romantics, Lorca had learned to interpret existence by applying his own feelings and senses to things. Throughout Impressions and Landscapes he filters the Spanish countryside through his consciousness, so that, as Luis de Luna observed, the work is less a portrait of a place than of the artist as a young man. Lorca understood this and warned readers that the book’s scenes are more accurately “passionate internal states” than objective renderings of external reality.
Acutely aware of the book’s flaws and of its overall insignificance to Spanish literature, Lorca spoke of the work’s “vagueness” and “melancholy,” qualities that owe as much to the book’s sources as to his own sensibility. Most of Impressions and Landscapes is derivative, an amalgam of romanticism, symbolism, and Hispanic modernismo, tempered by a keenly felt social consciousness whose most immediate inspiration is the Generation of ’98. In his haphazard attempts to paint an emotional and geographical portrait of Spain, Lorca was trying on styles, seeking a voice. His descriptions of Castile borrow thematically and stylistically from Machado and Unamuno. A section on “Gardens” draws heavily on Darío and Jiménez. The book is a miscellany of voices and styles. Passages of intense introspection follow mannered accounts of regional customs and scenes. Pedantic critiques of monuments alternate with lyrical, often synesthetic impressions of sunsets, landscapes, and mood. Musical terminology and references to Lorca’s favorite composers fill the text.