grotesque, without solution,
with the sadness of Cyrano
and Quixote,
redeeming
infinite impossibles
with the rhythm of the clock.
My voice is stained with bloody light,
and I see irises dry up
at its touch;
in my song
I wear the finery
of a white-faced clown. Love,
sweet Love, hides
under a spider.
Lachrymose and derivative, sensual and elegiac, Book of Poems is plainly the work of a gifted but immature writer. Lorca complained that parts of the collection were “oppressive,” even “terrible.” But the book was a turning point in his career. It captured an era and, in doing so, freed Lorca to move forward. As he acknowledged in the prologue to the collection, “It would be cruel to scorn this work, which is so intertwined with my very life.”
Lorca left Madrid in late June 1921, within weeks of the book’s publication, and went home to Granada. He joined his parents on their farm in Asquerosa and settled into the familiar rhythms of country life. “I’m very happy to be surrounded by my family, who love me so much,” he told a friend. The sights and sounds of the vega soothed him. Here, he said, “I scoff at the same passions which in the tower of the city hound me like a herd of panthers.” Removed from the distractions of Madrid and the petty rivalries of the city’s literary life, he could relax and focus on his work: “I believe I belong among these melodic poplars and lyrical rivers.”
But there were annoyances. He arrived home to find that copies of Book of Poems had only begun to trickle into Granada’s bookstores, and no mention of the collection had yet been made in either the local or the national press. Lorca himself was largely to blame, for he had left Madrid without telling anyone where to send the book. Discouraged, his parents pressed him to do what he could to generate interest in the volume. Lorca turned to friends for help. From Madrid, José Mora Guarnido rallied with an effusive review for the Noticiero Granadino, which the paper published on the front page of its July 3 edition. In his review, Mora trumpeted the release of Book of Poems and hailed Lorca as “a singer of stars, a hunter of dreams.”
On July 30, a second friend, Adolfo Salazar, a plump, dark-haired madrileño in his early thirties, published a long review of Book of Poems in the influential Madrid daily El Sol. A distinguished critic as well as musician, Salazar usually wrote about music, not books. But he made an exception with Book of Poems, for although he had not known Lorca long, he was deeply impressed by his talent and infatuated by his personality. In the headline to his review, Salazar proclaimed the advent of “A New Poet: Federico G. Lorca.” The critic enumerated Lorca’s gifts: the vivid emotion and sonority of his verse, the poet’s sense of childlike astonishment at nature’s beauty, his affinity with the popular tradition. While noting the collection’s flaws—its “inevitable reminiscences,” “forced attempts,” and “high-sounding and artificial expressions”—Salazar advised readers that Book of Poems was a “book of transition,” and did not represent Lorca’s current work. It contained, instead, the “simple fruits of his dawning,” and as such constituted the poet’s “farewell” to the “naive hours” of his early career.
The review was a breakthrough, the first wholly positive notice Lorca had received in the Spanish national press. The day after its appearance, Salazar wrote to Lorca to clarify a few of the points he had made in the piece and to remind him of the great affection he bore him. “I’m longing to see you and to hear your frank and hearty laughter.” He warned Lorca to expect envy—“in your case the numbers will grow”—but cautioned him to remember that “those of us who love you” would remain constant. Lorca wrote back quickly. His gratitude to Salazar was immense, and he turned warmly to the critic. “The only way to repay you is to tell you that as you already know my affection is sincere, and my heart will always be loyally yours.” He thanked Salazar for his “high praise” and acknowledged his own misgivings about Book of Poems. “What’s bad stands out … but, dear Adolfo, when the poems were at the printers they seemed to me (or they seem to me) all equally bad … If only you knew! I don’t find myself in my book.”
In Salazar, Lorca saw that he had a crucial new ally as well as a generous friend and confidant to whom he could look for encouragement and advice—both of which he dearly needed. He asked Salazar’s help in securing additional publicity for his book, complained of his difficulties with his parents, and paid elaborate tribute to Salazar himself. “If you could only see how I remember you! There are friendships that slip through the fingers like clear water, others are like a rose that one absent-mindedly sticks in his lapel, but true friendships are … limpets placed silently over the heart.”
Salazar replied at once. He chided Lorca for not having done more to publicize his book and urged him not to lose faith in his family. Parents, he advised, “are oblivious to the intrigues and petty details of the literary world.” He invited Lorca to join him on a three-month tour of Europe the following year. “Tell your parents how splendid this trip would be for your spirit.” But Lorca declined. It is not clear whether he did so because his parents objected to the trip, or because he himself was uncomfortable with the idea.
Book of Poems received three additional reviews. One, by Guillermo de Torre, an ultraist poet, was unfavorable. Torre took issue with the collection’s mostly traditional, nineteenth-century tone. The book’s other reviewers, Spanish critic Cipriano Rivas Cherif and British musicologist and Hispanist John B. Trend, sang its praises. Rivas Cherif noted the volume’s “intensely romantic aroma” and “lyrical pantheism.” Trend, who had met Federico briefly in Granada in 1919, wrote that Book of Poems seemed “less reminiscent than many first books of verse.” Trend’s review appeared in the British journal the Nation and Athenaeum and gave Lorca his first foreign press coverage.
Aside from these reviews, Book of Poems “languished in silence, like all first books,” as Lorca was to reflect. Disappointed by the volume’s meager reception, his parents resumed their campaign to get him to finish his university degree. According to Lorca, they regarded him as “a failure because no one talks about me.” Nonetheless, he was beginning to acquire a name. In Granada, his friend and longtime champion Fernando de los Ríos now introduced him to visitors as “our local poet.”
Between June and September 1921, Lorca plunged into an intense period of work on the suites he had begun earlier in the year in Madrid. He planned to publish them in the fall. The series revealed his growing esteem for popular song as well as his new taste for shortened lines and heightened metaphor, as exemplified both by the recent work of Juan Ramón Jiménez and by Japanese haiku.
In Madrid, where Asian verse forms were the latest rage, Lorca had tried his hand at a series of haiku (he sent the set to his mother as a gift), and from the experiment had learned to say more with less. To his brother he explained, “Haiku must convey emotion in two or three lines.” Lorca’s new poems, terse and keenly personal, did precisely that. Through his suites he sought to effect the condition of music, or, as he told Salazar, to “render in words the sublime sensations of a reflection, removing from the tremor whatever it has of baroque undulations.”