Former Columbian Lorca highlights everyday beauty of New York

It has been exactly 80 years since Spanish poet, playwright, and novelist Federico García Lorca lived and studied at Columbia University.

Born in 1898 in Fuente Vaqueros—a village outside of Granada, Spain—Lorca is one of Spain’s most celebrated writers, known for his inspired plays, extraordinary poetry, and gift for prose.

Soon after his term at Columbia, Lorca moved to Madrid and discovered his élan for writing. He wrote his first play “The Butterfly’s Evil Spell” in 1920, which achieved extremely little success—it depicted the romance of a butterfly and a cockroach, and was cancelled after four performances due to lack of critical appreciation.

However, Lorca’s later plays, including “When Five Years Pass” (1931) and “Blood Wedding” (1932), were much better-received.

Lorca also became close friends with artist Salvador Dalí and filmmaker Luis Buñel, both associated with the Surrealist movement in Spain. Dalí and Lorca collaborated on stage projects, with Lorca as writer and Dalí as set designer.

In addition to plays, Lorca wrote a number of poetry books throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Later, Lorca immortalized his year spent on Columbia’s campus in a collection entitled “Poet in New York” (“Poeta en Nueva York”), published in 1940.

In this collection, Lorca writes beautiful verses—an apotheosis of New York with its urban energy and mosaic of cultures, as well as an ode to Harlem, which became his favorite neighborhood during his stay in the city.

In Lorca’s poem “The Dawn,” from “Poet in New York” under the subheading “Poems of Solitude at Columbia University,” Lorca writes: “The New York dawn grieves / Along the immense stairways / Seeking amidst the groins / spikenards of fine-drawn anguish.”

In his poem, “Ode to Walt Whitman,” also published in “Poet in New York,” Lorca venerates Whitman, imagining him in New York as a source of inspiration: “And you, beautiful Walt Whitman, sleep on the shores of the / Hudson / With your beard pointed toward the pole and your hands open. / Soft clay or snow, your tongue is calling / comrades to watch over your bodiless gazelle / Sleep : nothing remains / A dance of walls shakes the prairies / And America skinks into machines and tears.”

Lorca’s poems written in and about New York describe the streets, the people, and the natural environs of the city in beautiful and evocative verses. He is known to have said that his year in New York was both pivotal to his literary career and full of inspiring images and human interactions.

These images are familiar to us as students: the Hudson River, dawn on Riverside Drive, walking home on Broadway. All are moments that Lorca captured with fresh eyes and with great attention to the detail and beauty of quotidian life in New York.