THE ICONIC STATUS that Federico García Lorca has attained in and outside Spain is bound up with his biography and with events and circumstances succeeding his death in 1936. His murder by Nationalists at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the censorship of much of his work during the years of dictatorship that followed, and the fact that the mass grave in which he was buried has yet to be uncovered, have contributed significantly to the idea of Lorca as martyr for the causes of freedom, truth and justice. So too, since the 1980s, his homosexuality, after years of silence, has been celebrated and presented ‘as one of the keys to his artistic output, helping to establish [his] relevance in a new world of pluralism and identity politics’. And yet, while any self-respecting critic would want to avoid engaging in an ‘uncritical, hagiographical treatment’ of the man and his oeuvre, and retain a healthy scepticism ‘of approaches that rely too heavily on the romantic ideas of the “genius”’, we ought nonetheless to acknowledge that Lorca would most certainly not have endured as an icon had it not been for the inherent strengths and qualities of his work. For notwithstanding the role his life and death have undoubtedly played in his reception, Lorca's reputation still has at its core the very poems and plays that continue to delight and move readers and audiences alike.

Over the years, critics have sought to increase the visibility of Lorca's lesser-known works – what Maria M. Delgado refers to, in her book on his theatre, as the ‘unknown’ Lorcas. Some, if not all of these, are products of Lorca's engagement with the aesthetics of the avant-garde and count among the more experimental of his works. Thus, his series of poems collected under the titles Canciones [Songs] and Suites [Suites] respectively, which he wrote in the early 1920s, as well as his Poema del cante jondo [Poem of the Deep Song] – better known because of its connection with a flamenco competition Lorca helped organize in 1922 – are all charac-terized by syntactical simplification and the eradication of emotionalism in accordance with the early twentieth-century avant-garde's emphasis on impersonal art: