As he himself wrote, "I have said a poet in New York, and I should have said, `New York in a poet."' Stripped bare, made vulnerable before this new world, Lorca kept his anguish from his family and in frequent letters home he chronicled a time filled with friends and parties, visits and discoveries. But his struggles with New York were real. Through poetry he discovered a way to contain and shape the experience, offering not so much a shield for protection as a way into himself and a conduit through the heartless modern megalopolis. Lorca's journey not only led to some of his finest writ ing, it also provided him with ways to address personal and social issues that would continue the rest of his shortlife. He became much less ambivalent about his homosexuality, more accepting of his conflicted but nevertheless deeply held religious faith, and deeply critical of the destructive capacity of unchecked industry and capitalism. Like a performer of cante jondo, or deep song, an especially emotive form of flamenco, he ended tip struggling with duende, that mysterious force that underlies all great art, his own particular duende as well as that of the city. As Lorca wrote in "Play and Theory of the Duende," duende leads neither to victory nor defeat; it is not a protective cloak or a fiery sword. And it certainly is not diversion. It doesn't keep "the lobsters of arsenic" from falling on your head. Duende wounds and with the wounding comes creation, the poem "baptizing with dark waters all who behold it."

When Lorca left New York for Cuba in 1930 he was not fleeing duende. It had come and gone, perhaps never to return again. In Cuba he found forms of music and dance-we should say forms of living-that were parallel to those he found among the North American blacks in the Harlem he so admired: "Blacks ... are among the most spiritual and delicate [beings] of that world. Because they believe, because they hope, because they sing, and because they have a truly religious lassitude...." And in those Cuban roots he encountered echoes and convergences of flamenco, of Hispanic notes embedded among African rhythms. As he approached Cuba he asked, "What is this? Once again Spain? Once again the global Andalusia?" In Cuba he discovered the Spanish duende and the African duende joined at the hip. Through his experiences in New York, through duende, he had discovered himself, wounded and wiser, a fuller man and a greater poet.

The great poets speak to each other, across time and language and they echo each other, not always consciously. To find Lorca's poetic peers we must look to Dante, Blake, Baudelaire, and Eliot. Dante's travels through the Inferno, like Eliot's through the Wasteland, are not unlike Lorca's through New York. His sense of innocence and experience, mediated by the imagination and driven to engage and understand the physical and spiritual world, echoes Blake. And his view of reality in which good and evil are in a continual dance, at times so manic they blur together, brings us to Baudelaire.

Lorca was not in any strict sense a man of politics, a poet of the political. He did not belong to any political party or subscribe to a particular ideology. He was, however, a man of deeply held convictions. From a very early age he felt a special bond to the peasants and gypsies, the common people of his native Andalusia. He witnessed the dire poverty in which they lived and was privy to the sordid conditions under which they functioned daily. For hundreds of years Spain had ignored the backbone of its population, the agrarian poor, who lived away from the centers of culture, such as Madrid and Barcelona. Lorca was a steadfast supporter of the Spanish Republic and in the 1930s, at a time when the republic was being challenged by the Nationalists, who longed for a return of the monarchy, with government support he founded La Barraca, a grass-roots theater project that took classical and contemporary plays, including his own, to all corners of Spain. Such an association, no matter that it was on behalf of Spanish culture, an immense source of pride for all Spaniards despite their political affiliation, was one of the factors that contributed to Lorca's murder.

In July 1936, long after Lorca returned from his trip to New York and Cuba, the tensions between loyalist supporters of the See and Spanish Republic and the Nationalists spilled over into open civil war. The following month Lorca was apprehended by a group of disaffected Nationalists and taken to the village of Viznar, a place notorious as an execution site. At dawn on the nineteenth of August, Lorca, along with a teacher and two anarchist bullfighters, was taken to a place called Fuente Grande and executed.

Why was Lorca killed? Was he shot because he was a poet, because he was a supporter of the republic, because he was a homosexual? Given his fame and the support he received from many people of diverse political beliefs, and considering how well-liked he and his family were in Granada, his murder defies the most ardent attempts at a reasonable explanation. His body was never found and it wasn't until 1986 that a monument was constructed where he is believed to have been murdered.