‘I’ve become a fashionable little boy,’ Lorca told his parents, ‘after my useful and advantageous trip to America’ (Stainton, p. 268). Indeed, our poet was much sought after upon his return to Spain. ‘Ahora,’ he wrote to his family from Madrid in October 1930, ‘todos los editores me acosan de tal manera que tengo que ir a Granada para recoger todas mis cosas, absolutamente todas, y publicarlas’ (EC, p. 695). ‘Aquí soy el de siempre,’ he added, ‘cada vez más temido, pero con una enorme influencia y un número fuerte de amigos, mucho más de lo que yo creía.’ His celebrity would be boosted also by a musical collaboration with Encarnación López Júlvez, ‘La Argentinita’, the poet accompanying the singer on the piano on five records of Spanish folk songs released by His Master’ Voice (see Gibson 1989, pp. 309–10, and Stainton, p. 284). There would be lectures, readings and, eventually, another trip across the Atlantic, this time to Buenos Aires where he stayed from October 1933 till March 1934 (see Gibson 1989, pp. 362–83, and Stainton, pp. 339–69). Above all, he would focus his attention on the theatre, writing and staging some of his best known plays, as well as involving himself with La Barraca, the touring student theatre group charged with the mission of taking the classics to the provinces (see Dennis, pp. 183–5; Gibson, pp. 320–4; and Stainton, pp. 294–8). Notwithstanding the protestations which had found their way into his New York poems only a short while before, in the turbulent years of the Second Republic, proclaimed in April 1931, it was the theatre and not poetry which provided the platform for Lorca to engage with social concerns. ‘As we move from 1931 to 1936,’ explains Andrew A. Anderson, ‘he tended to channel the more immediate, public and social themes into his drama, the genre which he likewise came to conceive of increasingly as one appropriate to those particular demands.’

By contrast, the poems Lorca wrote – relatively few compared with his production up to and including Poeta en Nueva York – ‘were very much personal expressions of mostly individual sentiments’ (Anderson 1990, p. 13).