Ode to Walt Whitman

Collected here in one bilingual edition are new translations of four small books of poems that were published during Federico Garcia Lorca's lifetime and span his most creative years. First Songs, poems inspired by the Andalusian countryside are comparable in style and theme to those in his masterpiece Poem of the Deep Song. This charming little book was given by Lorca to his friend Manuel Altolaguirre and his wife as a gift to their first child. Ode to Walt Whitman, a passionate meditation on homosexuality in a society that proscribes it, is perhaps the best-known book to have come out of the poet's New York Cycle of poems, a damning vision of urban life under capitalism. Perhaps Lorca's finest poem, A Flood of Tears for Ignacio Sanchez Mojis, is a moving elegy to his friend, a renowned bullfighter who was also a writer and a hero to a generation of poets. With Six Galician Poems, written in the Galician language, Lorca returns to themes of the simple life and folklore of the Spanish people. Published only a few months before the Spanish Civil War broke out, this book--a classic of Galician literature--never won the prominence it deserved.