The Poetics of Heterodox Desires in Federico García Lorca’s Late Poetry

Abstract

This article examines Federico García Lorca’s late poetic works from a queer perspective, offering close readings of a selection of poems from Diván del Tamarit and Sonetos del amor oscuro (1931-1936). Both works reveal Lorca’s mature lyrical approach to love experiences, desire and death, existential anguish and the role of poetic creation. I argue that Lorca creates a queer spatiotemporal realm in which the interweaving of desire and death mirrors the indeterminacy and transgressive nature of the bodies and identities invoked by the poetic voice. Drawing on Lorca’s poetic theory of duende, I examine fluidity and cyclicality between desire and death as key elements of heterodox subjective formation which challenge normative ideas of gender, affect, sexuality and identity. By transgressing time, space, bodies, gender and sexuality, Lorca imagines new and alternative ways of being, becoming and relating to the world which challenge linearity, logical or stable and fixed identities or binary physical-affective distinctions, proposing transformation, fluidity and metamorphosis as queer strategies of survival, rebirth and reinvention.