ABSTRACT
In its modern musical sense, a suite is a series of instrumental pieces on a single theme which are free in nature and number. And so, by extension, a literary suite is a sequence of poems on a single subject which may vary in number and mood. The suites were intended to mark a change in poetic direction from his first book of poetry, the Libro de poemas. As a sequence of poems, a suite provided Federico Garcia Lorca with a frame for a narrative about the self. Lorca not only published three of his suites in Juan Ramón Jiménez's little magazine Índice; he wrote some of the earliest ones under the spell of the older poet. Several of Lorca's suites take the Romantic and poetic customs of the nineteenth century as their point of departure. 'Herbarios' refers to a related Romantic custom of keeping a collection of pressed flowers or other plants.
