Odes

The book project began to develop in 1924. On July 3, 1924, it is dated Apunte para una Oda (Note for an Ode), the predecessor of Soledad. Tribute to Fray Luis de León. The first great poem in the book is the Ode to Salvador Dalí, which he began to devise in the summer of 1925, which he spent in the Vega of Granada (the family had already bought the Huerta de San Vicente (San Vicente Farmhouse), but were still renovating it). On several occasions, the author announced the finished book as ready for publication. At one point he said it would be accompanied by pictures. Like his other announced books, it would not be published as such during the author’s lifetime.

In 1925, Lorca travelled to Cadaqués and Barcelona. This trip and his friendship with Salvador Dalí was to be the biographical material on which his Ode would be based. During 1926, he continued to work on it, among other projects. He made fragments of it known to Dalí through his letters, and the latter protested that he still did not have access to the complete poem.

The Ode to Salvador Dalí attracted the attention of foreign critics such as Jean Cassou, who on July 1, 1926 praised it in the Mercure de France as a manifestation of “a completely new mood in Spain”. Cassou believes that this new way of doing things was to spread in Spanish poetry and that Federico’s poem was a demonstration or manifesto, and he recommends that some French magazine should offer the complete translation. Federico was very satisfied with these words and said that they were proof that he was being listened to, even in Paris!

At his speech-recital on April 8, 1926 in Valladolid he read extracts from the Oda a Salvador Dalí (Ode to Salvador Dalí), among other texts. It was a time when he took the opportunity at any conference, whenever he could, to speak of Salvador, whom he sincerely admired. He also had great success reciting the Ode to Salvador Dalí at the fifth session of the Spanish Cinema Club, a session called ”Oriente y Occidente” (“East and West”), in early April 1929. He recited it, after the films representing Oriente (Orient), this ode and the poem Thamar y Amnón (Thamar and Amnon).

The Oda al Santísimo Sacramento (Ode to the Blessed Sacrament) was started in early 1928 (letter from Lorca to Sebastià Gash in January 1928). Most of it was composed in the summer of that year, in the Huerta de San Vicente (San Vicente Farmhouse), at the height of the poet’s crisis after his relationship with Emilio Aladrén (letter from Lorca to Jorge Zalamea, summer 1928). A few months later he delivered the first two parts to the Revista de Occidente magazine, dedicating them to Falla. The musician came across the text in the magazine and wrote him a letter in which he thanked him for the dedication and expressed his differences with the author regarding the subject matter.

As the poem was incomplete, he hoped that the rest of it would change his impression. On September 17, he finished the Ode started at the beginning of the year, when he was already in New York. This Ode was read in Cuba by the critic Francisco Ichaso before a speech by Federico and some people reacted to it with indignation.

It seems that in Oda y burla de Sesostris y Sardanápalo (Ode and Mockery of Sesostris and Sardanápalo), composed, mainly, during the summer of 1928 in the Huerta de San Vicente (San Vicente Farmhouse), Lorca tackles the subject of homosexual eroticism. It could be that it conceals references to the person of Emilio Aladrén.