The intellectual and the masses: a sidelight on Lorca's Poeta en Nueva York

Most commentators on Lorca's Poeta en Nueva York point to the clash of cultures as a key element in the making of the collection: the shock and scandal of a Spanish writer ill at ease in the vast metropolis represented by New York at the end of the 1920s. This article, however, views Lorca's horror and alienation as similar to the disgust for the city and for crowds that is a preoccupation of many modernist authors, in particular those writing in English. The article will consequently draw attention to a number of parallels between Lorca's collection and the work of his English-speaking predecessors and contemporaries, as highlighted in John Carey's The Intellectuals and the Masses. Poeta en Nueva York emerges as a myopic and ungenerous view of humanity, and, as such, is definitively a work of its time.