Purdue University Monographs in Romance Languages (vols. 1–42, 1980–1992)

Lorca's poetry is founded upon a complex symbolical system of recurring motifs. This book analyses a number of those motifs as poetic signs through a contextual reading of Libro de poemas (1921) and Diván del Tamarit (1940) as the initial and final stages of Lorca's career. The sexual and religious crisis voiced in Libro de poemas achieves poetic articulation through the sign of the star, while the betrayal of childhood's fairytale is evidenced in the sign of the moon. Diván del Tamarit exemplifies the trancelike writing of the poetry of “opening up one's veins” as an activity developing between the desire for a word that will capture plenitude and the word's impenetrability to fix an impulse that, in itself, resists any determinacy.