Lorca spent much of the spring correcting proofs and rewriting individual poems for his book. He also began work on a new series of poems, a set of “suites” whose short, elliptical style differed radically from the poems he was about to publish. Sharply aware of the distinction between the two sets of verse, he told his parents his new poems were the “the most perfect thing” he had ever produced. “I’m very happy. Happy with myself and happy with my … future work!”
On June 15, ten days after Lorca’s twenty-third birthday, Maroto published Book of Poems “by Federico G. Lorca.” His mother sent her congratulations, and reminded Lorca to distribute copies of the book to every newspaper, politician, and man of letters in Granada. “I know that you know more than we do about these things,” she conceded, “but, my son, when it comes to matters of importance, parents can’t help thinking of their children as little boys and girls.”
Stacks of Book of Poems piled up in Federico’s room at the Residencia. As Lorca watched, Bello inscribed copies of the volume for their friends. The teenager signed Lorca’s name as if it were his own. It was the sort of joke both men loved.
Maroto had produced Book of Poems with meticulous care, setting the volume’s sixty-eight poems in handsome typography and beginning each poem on a new page. Both the cover and the frontispiece featured a small modernista image of a nude woman bathing. Lorca dedicated the 298-page book to his brother, “Paquito,” then eighteen, whose help in preparing the collection had been crucial. Despite their temperamental differences and the constant comparisons between the two at home, Lorca adored his younger brother and had come to rely on his astute critical eye.
It was Paco who had persuaded him to include samples of his earliest verse in Book of Poems, so that readers could get an accurate picture of the poet’s artistic evolution. As a result, many poems in the collection were more than three years old by the time the book appeared, and illuminate the process of self-criticism and self-censorship Lorca had undergone in assembling the book. To underscore their age and aesthetic disparity, as though documenting an archive, he dated each work and in many instances noted the place of its composition. He was conscious of the collection’s “limitations” and “irregularities,” and in an apologetic prologue to the volume cautioned readers, “I offer, in this book, which is all youthful ardor, and torture, and measureless ambition, the exact image of my days of adolescence and youth.” Each poem in the volume reminded him of his passionate childhood, he said, “running about naked through the meadows of a vega against a mountainous background.”
Book of Poems is the largest, most wide-ranging collection of poetry Lorca was to publish in his lifetime. Culled from the vast outpourings of his adolescence, it is, together with Impressions and Landscapes and The Butterfly’s Evil Spell, a portrait of his youth. Like those works it announces Lorca’s talent and introduces the primary themes of his art: love, death, childhood, nature, God, the character of the poet and of poetry. Although in time Lorca would learn to transform the reflective, vaguely melancholy quality of these first works into acute drama, he never strayed far from their subject matter.
Nature is the chief source of inspiration in Book of Poems, and the vega its principal setting. From the volume’s first stanza to the last, Lorca delights in the region, lovingly cataloging its insects and sunsets, moonscapes and wheatfields, forcing readers to view the collection’s author in the context of his native Andalusia, and thereby stressing his ties with the region’s more celebrated turn-of-the-century poets: Jiménez, Manuel and Antonio Machado, Salvador Rueda, and Francisco Villaespesa, whose melodramatic reworkings of symbolist idioms and emotions struck a resonant chord in Lorca. He clearly saw himself as one in a distinguished line of Andalusian poets. Of the water that courses through the vega’s streams and irrigation canals, he writes:
It is the intimate sap
that ripens the fields,
the blood of poets
who loosed their souls
to wander all the ways
of Nature.
Formally, Book of Poems resembles a metrical exercise book, with lines ranging from the conventional alexandrines of high-art verse to the brief lyrics of the Spanish oral tradition. In the collection’s best poems, Lorca discards the Hispanic modernismo of his earliest writing and invokes the sparse language of popular verse. Lines shorten, metaphors replace similes, and Lorca reveals his startling gift for images, one sharpened by his contact in Madrid with the creationist and ultraist movements. A welcome note of irony and playfulness appears. Trees, he writes, are “arrows / fallen from blue.” The half-moon is a “fermata” that “marks a pause and splits / the midnight harmony.”
The poems in this “disordered” collection, as Lorca described it in his prologue, span the years 1917 to 1920 and show a writer straining to find himself. Lorca draws heavily on the authors he most admired in adolescence: Darío, Unamuno, Hesiod, Hugo, Goethe, Jiménez, and above all Antonio Machado, with whom Lorca shares a nostalgia for childhood, a love of traditional Spanish song, and a predilection for such images as the unknowable “road of life” and the terrible “waterwheel of time.” In the volume’s older, more discursive poems, he adopts a declamatory tone he later shunned. In newer works he is far briefer and more personal. The ill-defined melancholy that marks much of the collection gives way to an acute perception of what suffering and loss entaiclass="underline" “And the real soul awakens in death? / And the thoughts we think now are swallowed by night?”
In several of the book’s newer poems, Lorca borrows refrains and images from traditional children’s songs, works whose abbreviated lines and fragmentary plots he had known since boyhood. Although his use of children’s songs is often superficial—a parody of the real thing rather than a deeply imagined reworking of its elements—the effort nevertheless points to a new direction in his work, a new way of envisioning childhood. “Who showed you the road / of the poets?” a group of children asks the narrator in “Ballad of the Little Square.”
“The fountain and the stream / of the old song,” the poet replies.
Throughout Book of Poems, Lorca explores the familiar modernista dialectics of sin and innocence, carnal and celibate existence, flesh and spirit. He pits the pagan splendor of ancient Rome against the dull morality of Catholic Spain. Venus becomes “the world’s harmony” and God a capricious being in a “boring old blue heaven” who plays with human beings “like toy soldiers.” Satan is a friend: “we took an exam in Lust together.” The book’s young narrator mourns the loss of his arcadian youth and seeks comfort in nature and in language. Baffled by sex, scorned by women, racked by desire, he weeps his passion “like a lost child” and wanders alone down the street,