The central poem of the Poet in New York (Poeta en Nueva York) cycle, “Ode to Walt Whitman” is one of Federico García Lorca’s lyric landmarks in which the poet uses avant-garde form (including free verse and surrealist imagery) to express his views on the relationship between an artist and his audience.
As its title suggests, the poem pays homage to Walt Whitman, one of the founders of contemporary American verse, who strove to achieve in his poetry qualities found in the natural world and whose work was sometimes banned in his native United States for its explicit references to the male body. This tension between an innovative artist and the reception of his work by the general public is one of the central themes and also an organizing principle of this poem.
Already in the opening, García Lorca’s portrayal of Whitman—a near mythical figure of natural nobility, beauty, and wisdom—contrasts with the image of New York miners, an anonymous mass engaged in the monotonous labor in a city of “alambre y muerte” (wire and death).
Throughout the poem, García Lorca matches in Spanish both Whitman’s vigorous and fluid poetic style and his imagery to denounce the crowd that misconstrues a poet’s aspiration for an ideal purity found in nature in terms of base desires.
Like in the rest of the Poet in New York, desperation and frustration with the country of “machinery and lament” (“máquinas y llanto”) are dominant moods in the Ode. Nonetheless, the poem marks the turning point within the context of García Lorca’s oeuvre at large. “Ode to Walt Whitman” is one of the first works in which the poet openly discusses homosexuality, the subject he had been unable to address in conservative Spain.
Through his homage to Whitman, the poet finds ways to connect this idea of forbidden love with the idea of nature and also of art. Addressing intermittently Whitman and the crowd, García Lorca distinguishes between a natural longing for love in its many manifestations (“the little boy who writes the name of a girl on his pillow,” “the boy who dresses as a bride in the darkness of his wardrobe,” “the solitary men in casinos who drink prostitution’s water with revulsion,”) and the sexual urges of “maricas” (faggots), an ignorant mass eager to destroy what lies beyond their understanding:
“Mothers of mud. Harpies. / Sleepless enemies of the love that bestows crowns of joy.”
The speaker’s indignation with this mass escalates throughout the poem, reaching the tone of a manifesto in which Whitman’s particular story is an allegory for the universal situation of an artist and in which Whitman’s love of nature is a symbol of pure love that in itself is a form of art.
Much like the reception of Whitman’s own work, the reception of García Lorca’s poem was controversial. Only 50 copies were published in Mexico in 1934, and despite its innovative nature, the poem was not published in Spain during García Lorca’s lifetime.
Bibliography
“Ode to Walt Whitman.” Translated by Greg Simon and Steven F. White. In The Poetical Works of Federico García Lorca. Volume II. Collected Poems, edited by Christopher Maurer. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991.
Categories: Literature, Spanish Literature, World Literature
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