Lorca's Drawings and Poems

Book excerpt: Lorca's Drawings and Poems focuses on the act of reading Lorca's drawn or written texts and how the reading of one genre can inform the reading of another. Throughout the study, poetry and drawings from every period of Lorca's career are examined. Selected drawings are interpreted; next, poems contemporary to those drawings are analyzed in their light. In chapter 1, a common poetics is extracted from Lorca's comments about his drawings and writing and placed in the context of the literary and artistic movements of his day. The evolution of the literary criticism that examines Lorca's drawings is traced and reviewed. Lorca's texts are examined from varying perspectives in the chapters that follow. In chapter 2, drawings and poems from 1927 to 1928 are analyzed in light of Lorca's participations in artistic and literary movements during those years. Texts from each period of Lorca's work are read in chapter 3 in a study of Lorca's employment of space and his depiction of setting and subject in his drawings and poems. Such a chronological approach allows the reading of Lorca's texts to reveal the evolution of his aesthetics as well as to identify the imagery and techniques that remained consistent throughout his career.