Abstract

In his lecture of 1933, Theory and Play of "el Duende" the poet Federico Garcia Lorca proposed three possible different ways for approaching artistic creation: The poetics of the angel, the muse and el duende . The artist of the angel composes effortlessly, inspiration comes from without and, through the work of art, this creator aspires to an ideal world different to the one of our everyday experience. The artist of the muse is concerned with intelligence and form in art. In this poetics, inspiration comes from without, not from any angelic world, but from universal intelligence. Lorca includes himself in the third category, together with el duende artists, whose poetics could be summarize as follows: It is an art of struggle between the artist and creative process. It comes from the depths of the artist's soul. It expresses the wisdom of an ancient culture, a kind of pantheistic wisdom. Love is a central force to this poetics. It is an art of presence. It is a poetics of the liminal and the limits in art. In my dissertation Lorca's aesthetics are examined from the point of view of the category of el duende. ;Lorca's pantheism is inscribed in his elemental poetics, whose basic principle is the projection of the poet's psyche upon the elements and force of nature. The proximity of this principle to mythological stories, suggested to me the use of a mythopoetic method. By this method I mean the examination of Lorca's symbolic projections in nature and society using the vocabularies of the different world mythologies as well as those provided by different lyrical traditions. Due to Lorca's historical context, I pay special attention to sufi lyric. My method is not only mythic, but poetic as well, and by this I mean that I extend Lorca's aesthetical framework in order to obtain some variations of the old myths. The two main variations that I work with are the myth of the terrible presence and the myth of queja amorosa