Poem of cante jondo

Federico García Lorca and Manuel de Falla connected cante jondo with the purity demands of the international avant-garde. The first fruit of this collaboration was the First Cante Jondo Contest, held in Granada in 1922; the second, the Poema del cante jondo, lyrical interpretation of an agonizing and secret world. It is a book written in 1921 and published in 1931.
This is how Federico García Lorca describes his vision of cante jondo, delivered at the Centro Artístico on the night of February 19:

“You see, gentlemen, the transcendence of cante jondo and what a great success our people had in calling it that. It is deep, truly deep, deeper than all the wells and all the seas that surround the world—much deeper than the present heart that creates it and the voice that sings it—because it is almost infinite. It comes from distant races, traversing the graveyard of the years and the fronds of withered winds. It comes from the first cry and the first kiss.”

The Poema del Cante Jondo together with the Romancero gitano represent the essential peak of the poetry of Federico García Lorca. We find here the deepest, most stylized, tragic and most universal vision of Andalusia and its soul, of whom he was its best interpreter in poetry.