Federico Garcia Lorca Occupies Wall Street: “A Poet in New York” and Global Crisis

• Books & Literature
• Legal, Politics & Economics

In the year he spent in New York, Federico Garcia Lorca witnessed the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and its aftermath. His book Poet in New York, which dramatically captures that crisis in various ways, was not published until 1940, shortly after the end of the Spanish Civil War and four years after the poet’s assassination at its outbreak. This lecture concentrates on the triple chronology of this landmark book – the year it was written, the year it was published, and our present day – and how economic, social, and identity crises are intertwined in a work whose poety is as much surrealistic as it is social. Lorca’s reflections on that experience in his lectures and letters might also throw some light on his enigmatic visions of a harsh reality in a book that was written in, and perhaps meant to be read in an era of global turmoil.