Federico García Lorca, at the Huerta de San Vicente, Granada, c. 1932. Wikimedia Commons · public domain.
Poet · Pairing VII
Federico García Lorca
1898–1936 · Spanish poet and playwright
“Verde que te quiero verde.”
Federico García Lorca was Spain’s most beloved modern poet and a giant of its theatre. Born near Granada in Andalusia, in southern Spain, he drew deeply on the region’s folk songs, Roma culture, landscape, and flamenco — fusing them with the daring imagery of European surrealism.
His 1928 collection Romancero gitano (Gypsy Ballads), which includes “Romance Sonámbulo,” made him famous across the Spanish-speaking world. His poems and plays — among them the tragedies Blood Wedding and The House of Bernarda Alba — are steeped in passion, moonlight, longing, and death.
At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Lorca was arrested and killed by Nationalist forces; he was only 38. His murder made him an enduring symbol of art destroyed by political violence, and his work remains widely read and performed today.
In this curriculum
Read him in Pairing VII — High Modernism & the Surreal →