Poema Del Cante Jondo: Popular or Elitist?

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Surrounded by a society in which poetry was the fashion, Lorca wrote this set of poems at an early age. `Poetry was a social, friendly accomplishment, natural to the society in which Garcia Lorca was born'. He was very attached to his hometown and drawn to his own culture. The poems he wrote in 1922 from the popular Andalusia music were an inspiration to many other poets. Lorca wrote Poema del cante jondo in the attempt to approximate language through his poems, and music through methods to make the writing rhythmic. He also wanted to sanitise music from a very ancient tradition known as the flamenco, which used to mainly take place in brothels. He saw it as corrupted and wanted to give it that sense of purity back. In one of his lectures, Lorca describes the origins of the Cante Jondo. These poems originally songs coming from India were brought to Spain by the gypsies. Maurer describes Lorca's most frequent style of writing as popular or traditional art . Many of his poems used to be popular songs such as weddings, ballads, religious chants, love lyrics and lullabies. Yet, could his poems be described as popular?

Certain themes are very frequent in García Lorca's poems of el Cante jondo. Death, love, pain, and grief come under many different aspects within the poems. The themes of death, pain and grief are the most frequent ones, they can be found in almost all poems. Death can come in many forms, such as blood, as a cross, in conversations, the moon and many more. Death is very often implied as being far away, toward the unknown: `(...) y por el aire ascienden /espirales de llanto / un punto lejano" . There are many representations of people walking on a path to that unknown death. This path is seen as a labyrinth...

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...ent and wit without losing his audience. He therefore combined the two to create elitist poems with some touches of the popular.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

- Lorca and the Spanish Poetic tradition, J.B. Trend (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1956)

- The poetical works of Federico García Lorca, C. Maurer (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1991)

- Lorca, A dream of life, L. Staiton (Bloomsbury, 1998)

- La poesía mítica de Federico García Lorca, G. Correa (Editorial Gredos, 1975)

- Deep songs and other porse, C. Maurer (London/Boston: Marion Boyars, 1954)

- Selected poems, F.G.Lorca (USA: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1995)

- Lorca and the Spanish Avant-Garde: Autonomous and Elitist art, F. Bonaddio, Harris, Derreck, ed, changing times in Hispanic Culture (Aberdeen: Centre for the study of the Hispanic Avant-Garde, University of Aberdeen, 1996), page 97-109.

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