ABSTRACT
Federico Garcia Lorca became a modernist in the international sense of the word through a process of askesis, in which he learned to excise his most personal concerns from the poem and, simultaneously, to move away from an older mode of making poetry that had been discredited by the avant-garde. The suites are a record of what it cost the poet to achieve the new aesthetic as they reveal the poetic subject turning one theme over and over — the pessimistic idea of an impossible love. In many ways the book of Canciones Lorca brought out in 1927 is representative of his personal synthesis of the different aesthetic currents of the twenties: a dehumanized lyric, a poesía pura, a poetry that savours of the haiku. The Poema del cante jondo has never been studied in connection with the suites, as poetic sequences essentially constructed on the same principle.
