romances, ‘‘developed a style—turgid and diffi-
cult, infuriating his age, which became known
as Culteranismo. And inasmuch as Go ́ngora
was the great representative of Culteranismo it
became known asGo ́ngorismo.’’
What else but the same escape upward! As in
the Poems of Saint Teresa! When Go ́ngora
found himself confined by the old, unwilling to
go back to the borrowed Italianate mode, he
sought release in an illogical, climbing manner,
precursor of today. He could not go back to
Latin, to Greek or the Italian. Never to the
French—so he went up! steeply, to the illogical,
to El Greco’s tortured line. So that when Luza ́n
and those other humanists (who after a century
were restoring good taste) applied themselves
to destroy the sect and its consequences—
denouncing its founder—they took Go ́ngora
and detestable poet to be one and the same thing.
It was for Federico Garcı ́a Lorca, in our
day, to find a solution. Like the young Go ́ngora,
Lorca adopted the old Spanish modes. I have
taken his bookLlanto por Ignacio Sa ́nchez Mei-
jı ́as(Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter)tobe
touched upon for the conclusion of these notes.
There has always seemed to be a doubt in the
minds of Spaniards that their native meters were
subtle enough, flexible enough to bear modern
stresses. But Lorca, aided by the light of Twen-
tieth-Century thought, discovered in the old
forms the very essence of today. Reality, imme-
diacy; by the vividness of the image invoking
the mind to start awake. This peculiarly mod-
ern mechanic Lorca found ready to his hand.
He took up the old tradition, and in a more
congenial age worked with it, as the others had
not been able to do, until he forced it—without
borrowing—to carry on as it had come to him,
intact through the ages, warm, unencumbered
by draperies of imitative derivation—the world
again under our eyes.
The peculiar pleasure of his assonances in
many of the poems in this book retains the sing-
ing quality of Spanish poetry and at the same
time the touch of that monotony which is in all
primitive song—so well modernized here: In the
first of theromanceswhich make up the book’s
latter half, ‘‘La Casada Infiel,’’ the play is on the
letter o; in ‘‘Preciosa Y El Aire’’ upon e; in
‘‘Romance de la Guardia Civil Espan ̃ola’’ upon
a; etc., etc. This is straight fromEl Cid;butnotthe
scintillating juxtapositions of words and images
in the three ‘‘Romances Histo ́ricos’’ (at the very
end), where the same blurring, of the illogical, as
of refracted light suggests that other reality—the
upward sweep into the sun and the air which
characterized the aspirations of St. Teresa, of El
Greco and the Go ́ngora whom none understood
or wished to understand in his day, the ‘‘obscur-
ities’’ which Unamuno embraces with his eye
toward ‘‘Augustine, the great African, soul of
fire that split itself in leaping waves of rhetoric,
twistings of the phrase, antitheses, paradoxes and
ingenuities... a Go ́ngorine and a conceptualist at
the same time. Which makes me think that Go ́n-
gorism and conceptualism are the most natural
forms of passion and vehemence.’’
The first stanza of Lorca’s greatest poem, the
lament, has for every second line the refrain:Alas
cinco de la tarde—‘‘at five in the afternoon.’’
That refrain,A las cinco de la tarde, fasci-
nated Lorca. It gives the essence of his verse. It is
precise, it is today, it is fatal. It gives the hour,
still in broad daylight though toward the close of
the day. But besides that it is song. Without
reading Lorca aloud the real essence of the old
and the new Spanish poetry cannot be under-
stood. But the stress on the first syllable of the
‘‘CINco’’ is the pure sound of a barbaric music,
the heartbeat of a man’s song,A lasCINco de la
tarde. What is that? It is any time at all, no time,
and at the same time eternity. Every minute is
eternity—and too late.A lasCINco de la tarde.
There is the beat of a fist on the guitar that
cannot escape from its sorrow, the recurring
sense of finality translated to music. The fatality
of Spain, the immediacy of its life and of its song.
A lasCINco de la tarde, Mejı ́as was killed! was
killed on a bull’s horns.A lasCINco de la tarde,
he met his end.
This is the brutal fact, the mystical fact. Why
preciselya lasCINco de la tarde? The mystery of
any moment is emphasized. The spirit of Go ́n-
gora, the obscure sound of the words is there.
Much in the examples of Lorca must have
been in the mind of the elder poet when he
strained at the cords of the old meter, the old
thoughts, refusing to adopt the Italianate modes
of his immediate predecessors until the words
broke like a bridge under him and he fell through
among fragments—wisely.
Two years after the event the Spaniard takes
a man killed in action—a bullfighter killed in
Mexico—for his theme. No matter what the
action, he was a man and he was killed: the same
ethical detachment and the same freedom fromLament for Ignacio Sa ́nchez Mejı ́as