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This chapter examines the efforts of Stephen Spender, Manuel Altolaguirre, and several of their associates to create a European anti-fascist poetic community for which the bonds between the Auden Generation and the Spanish Generation of ’27 would be central. The frames for this work are the claims by Ortega, in several articles in English, and Altolaguirre, in his journal 1616: English and Spanish Poetry, that England and Spain shared a unique history that compelled cooperation; the attempts, led primarily by Spender, to channel Spanish voices of the conflict through British literary culture; and the battles over the political and cultural significance of Lorca’s assassination. Spender, one of Lorca’s earliest translators, found himself defending his view of the Spaniard’s mutable, populist figure against its misappropriation. With the aid of two Spanish collaborators, Spender influentially characterized him instead as an apolitical Spanish-European poet, and he edited the volume Poems for Spain, which intercalated British and Spanish voices on the war. At the same time, while Poems for Spain evinces the mutual influences of two literary generations, its publication in March 1939, when Franco’s victory was ensured, made it an elegy for the lost Republic. The awkward and ultimately failed literary endeavors taken up in this chapter underwent significant revisions both in Spender’s poetry and in later translations of Lorca.

Poet-translators have played a key role in the creation of the American Lorca. This chapter examines the strategies of domestication seen in a few paradigmatic cases. It begins with Langston Hughes's Gypsy Ballads, which he began to work on in Madrid during the Spanish civil war and published in 1951. The two translations that generated the most enthusiasm for Lorca in this decade were both published in 1955: The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca, a compendium of translations by various hands, and Ben Belitt's The Poet in New York. Paul Blackburn's Lorca/Blackburn did not have the historical impact of these other translations, since it was published posthumously in 1979. Blackburn's translation, however, was produced during the pivotal period of American Lorquismo and throws into relief some key issues about the practice of translation at midcentury.

No study of Lorca's poetry on its own terms can explain why his poetry resonated so strongly in the United States. For an explanation of this resonance, this chapter turns to a set of purely domestic criteria that have little to do with Lorca as he might appear within his own cultural context. Lorca was particularly attractive to poets seeking to define a new variety of American cultural nationalism. He arrived on the scene as an alien figure, strongly identified with a quite different brand of national exceptionalism—that of Spain itself. Far from being an obstacle, however, Lorca's foreignness proved useful to those in search of a form of American cultural nationalism that might stand opposed to cold war politics. Lorca's poetry came to the fore with the poets associated with The New American Poetry, an anthology published in 1960. The contributions of African American and gay male poets are especially noteworthy during this period, but there is also a more generic Lorquismo, characterized by a tone of naive enthusiasm and by a proliferation of abusive citations of the duende.

This chapter sketches a portrait of Lorca as a charismatic, protean, and enigmatic authorial figure. It establishes an implicit point of comparison with the Americanized Lorca that dominates the rest of the book. It presents a Lorca that has a greater intellectual capacity and a more highly developed literary culture than the mythic stereotype allows for. Incomplete or misleading views of Lorca have their roots in romantic ideas of poetic genius, and in stereotypes of Andalusian culture left over from European constructions of romantic Spain, often filtered through the popular writings of Ernest Hemingway.

As the driving force behind the original deep image school, Jerome Rothenberg was an indispensable figure in American Lorquismo in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but in subsequent decades Lorca makes only sporadic appearances in his work. As Rothenberg left the deep image behind him, he also stopped following developments in Spanish poetry after Lorca. Rothenberg's major accomplishment of the late 1960s and 1970s was to found the discipline of ethnopoetics, which can be defined as the study of archaic and tribal poetry and poetics with a sensibility informed by the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century. Rothenberg's 1993 book The Lorca Variations represents a return to a major influence after a long hiatus. After translating the Suites for Christopher Maurer's authoritative 1991 edition of Lorca's collected poetry in English, Rothenberg went on to create a kind of Lorquian pastiche by recombining images taken from this book.

This part studies the New York prose and poetry of José Moreno Villa, one of the most overlooked cultural figures of twentieth-century Iberian Studies. As a gateway to the context surrounding Moreno Villa's New York, this part begins with a prefatory discussion of Federico García Lorca and his epistolary writing in which he assesses travel to New York as one of the most useful experiences of his life while also repeatedly noting the continuous linguistic negotiations surrounding him while in the city. Then, this part introduces Moreno Villa and the fruits of his transatlantic travel: Pruebas de Nueva York (1927) and Jacinta la pelirroja (1929). Overall, it argues that Moreno Villa's past experiences coupled with his vulnerable linguistic position, as a result of travel, tuned him in the languages of photography, jazz, and the careful use of Spanish, English, and other languages. In doing so, this part proposes that Moreno Villa's literary New York brought his readers more than a superficial experience but one that introduced new discourses and considerations of language and its relationship to other media.

In the years immediately prior to the emergence of deep image poetry, a few American poets put Lorca to more personal and idiosyncratic uses. Jack Spicer's 1957 After Lorca is not only the most extended and complex instance of Lorquian apocrypha in any language, but also a crucial work in his own development as a poet and, consequently, one of the most significant works of postwar American poetry. Before discussing Spicer's book, this chapter briefly examines a Robert Creeley poem of the same title, written five years earlier in 1952. Creeley's “After Lorca” does not have great significance within his own literary formation: it is quite different from Creeley's poetry of the early 1950s and did not lead him in new directions for his subsequent work. “After Lorca,” nonetheless, is noteworthy both as the first apocryphal Lorca poem written in English and as an intriguing instance of experimental translation.

Kenneth Koch is a poet strongly identified with French literature. His interest in Spanish poetry is limited to a single figure: Federico García Lorca. This one figure, nevertheless, shows up more often in his prose and verse than almost any single French poet, with the possible exception of Raymond Roussel. The chapter first to looks at Koch's actual view of French poetry, and in particular the surrealist movement, before turning to the question of his Lorquismo.

This chapter addresses the phenomenon of “deep image” poetry, a movement in midcentury U.S. poetics that reportedly owes a portion of its initial impetus to Lorca. It argues that the debt of deep image poetry to Lorca is less substantial than many critics have assumed. The founders of this movement drew inspiration from many sources aside from the “Spanish surrealism,” while Lorca himself has a minor role in the later development of this style.

This chapter examines the poetry of Frank O'Hara, identifying points of convergence between him and Lorca. It suggests that O'Hara is a more “Lorquian” figure than either Robert Bly or James Wright. He belongs, in at least one or two facets of his work, to the tradition of bardic, charismatic twentieth-century figures like Mayakovsky, Lorca, and Ginsberg. This connection may be just as arbitrary as the conventional linking of Lorca to the deep image poets. The choice of interpretive frameworks is not natural or given, and literary traditions are always somewhat arbitrary, constructed after the fact in a selective process. At the very least, though, an exploration of O'Hara's Lorquismo has a heuristic value, showing that the divisions between rival schools of contemporary American poetry are not as clearcut as they might appear.

This chapter discusses Federico García Lorca's concept of soul—what he called duende. As the muse of Lorca's imagination, duende transported his poetry and music to great heights and simultaneously agitated and menaced the powers of his age. Shaped and created in a similar likeness to “soul,” duende is a Spanish translation of the creative grace that transfigures suffering into some of the finest achievements in music, poetry, religion, and the arts. To Lorca's fascist critics, duende was the stuff of heresy, a kind of disease and deviation from the canonical values of society that if not checked could lead to full-blown plague. Critics of this sort sought to sanitize or sterilize Lorca's pen of all such rebellious instincts.

This chapter is concerned with intertextual aspects of civil war literature and with the way such intertexts complicate and intensify the aesthetic response to the suffering and loss associated with civil discord, examining a disparate group of songs and poems that share a universalizing strategy for representing contemporary civil wars: works reflecting civil war in seventeenth‐century England, nineteenth‐century America, and twentieth‐century Spain. Authors considered include John Denham, Bob Dylan, Abraham Cowley, Andrew Marvell, Herman Melville, William Cullen Bryant, Richard Henry Stoddard, Robert Lowell, Federico García Lorca, Geoffrey Parsons, and Miklós Radnóti. This strategy is particularly salutary given the need for a literary response to reach readers on (or sympathetic to) both sides; otherwise it risks being propaganda.

This chapter argues that Lorca's poetic afterlife in the United States has its own context, as worthy of respect as the cultural and literary context of Lorca's Spain. Understandably, American poets did not attempt a scholarly reconstruction of the circumstances in which Lorca wrote, or delve deeply into Spanish literary history in order to arrive at a better understanding of his poetic tradition. The real strength of the American Lorca is its apocryphal character, its lack of respect for the original context, not its scrupulously accurate treatment of the original text.

Chapter Two examines ventriloquism within economic and sexual scenarios, noting the top-down appropriation of the child’s voice and body and the carnivalesque bottom-up resistance. This chapter analyzes the child musical film of the cine con niñoEl pequeño ruiseñor (Del Amo 1956) and follows the trace to the nuevo cine con niño’s La mala educación (Almodóvar 2004). Symbolism within and across Almodóvar’s intertexts El pequeño ruiseñor, Mi último tango (Amadori 1960), and canonical playwright-poet Federico García Lorca’s non-canonical work El retablillo de Don Cristóbal (1934) converges upon the carnivalesque, puppetry, and violence. The economic vocal exploitation of altar boy Joselito’s (José Jiménez Fernández) ‘golden voice’ in El pequeño ruiseñor is followed with the sexual appropriation of the boy singer by his pedophilic priest lyricist and literature teacher in Almodóvar’s film. Both films expose the ideological and ritual function of the Francoist cine con niño. La mala educación’s pessimistic plot first offers an imaginative alternative to the Francoist legacy through the former child victim’s blackmail scheme, but the carnivalesque inversions of victim and aggressor lead to the demise of both.

This chapter sets out Henderson’s conception of the folk tradition, and its manifestations in his work as a folk revivalist and as a folklore scholar. In collecting songs and redistributing them, Henderson analysed this tradition whilst also contributing to it. His work can therefore be approached as an interrogation of the limits of the individual’s own cultural ‘mediation’. This dynamic both liberated Henderson’s political imagination and plagued it with doubts over the manipulation and affectations of folk ‘voices’. Henderson’s own contributions to the field of folklore studies are placed in the context of on-going scholarly discourse, but also in relation to his own work as one who sought to operationalize a culture he was convinced belonged to the ages and was immune to interference. Federico García Lorca’s comments on the duende, and the vital folk culture of Scotland’s travelling people helped Henderson to glimpse the unbounded reach of the folk tradition and, consequently, the limited scope of the folklorist-revivalist. Through each of these chapters, Henderson’s struggle with the endless distance between himself – the poet, songwriter, folk revivalist, and folklorist – and the political and cultural lives of ‘the people’, is a constant feature.

Intent on pursuing her new career as a poet, Ruth Krauss decided to learn French at the age of fifty-nine. She and Crockett Johnson planned a summer vacation in 1960—they thought about Quebec so she could practice reciting French poetry. Before leaving for Canada, Johnson sent a dramatic adaptation of his Barnaby comic strip to E. Y. Harburg, who declined it. Instead, it was picked up by the Hall Syndicate, and Johnson began updating the original plots for the 1960s. While Johnson oversaw the production of revised Barnaby strips, Krauss worked on her poetry, writing a group of poems inspired by Federico García Lorca. In addition to the new Barnaby, Johnson was busy with advertising work and children’s books. He also returned to his most successful character, putting together Harold’s ABC. When Harper and Brothers merged with textbook publisher Row, Peterson, and Company in May 1962, Krauss and Johnson began to publish more frequently with other presses.

This chapter explores some of the synergies between Spanish soul and black American traditions through Ralph Ellison's depiction of soul. In turning to Ellison, a contemporary of Lorca, this chapter falls in the thick of musical and cultural currents of soul. Like many black writers of the twentieth century, Ellison brought musical cadences and flows into the mighty river of American literature, injecting some of its stagnant waters with a fresh tributary of style. By adding his lyrical voice to American literature, he used his pen the way black musicians used their instruments, making it sing on behalf of a black American experience that was invisible in many parts of America. He not only honored conceptions of soul in black music, folklore, literature, and religion in this way, but also simultaneously exposed the blindness and tone deafness of many Americans.

This chapter documents the influence of French symbolists and great Romantic lyric poets on the filmmaking of Joseph Cornell. The French symbolists (especially Mallarmé) show prominently in his “collage films” (Rose Hobart, Cotillion, The Children’s Party, The Midnight Party, Bookstalls, By Night with Torch and Spear, Gnir Rednow, Jack’s Dream); the poems of Keats, Dickinson, Lafargue, and Lorca in A Legend for Fountains, Centuries of June, The Aviary, Nymphlight, Angel, and Seraphina’s Garden.