Stylistic Analysis of Lorca, Hernández, and Machado
Style of Federico García Lorca
Lorca’s style, often described as poetic realism, transcends reality through symbolism and literary devices. This poetic realism uses lyrical elements, primarily achieved through symbolism, to elevate the text. Lorca’s style in The House of Bernarda Alba represents a refinement of his literary career. Prose lines nearly disappear, replaced by lyrical prose and poetry. This lyricism stylizes reality into black and white, incorporating both denotation and connotation. The dialogue is vigorous, energetic, short, and pithy, with terse sentences characteristic of dramatic dialogue. This dialogue characterizes the individuals, providing them with personality. Lorca masterfully uses the rich, expressive vulgar speech of rural Andalusia without falling into rural drama clichés. Ellipsis and specific expressions from the countryside and the female world contribute to the play’s authenticity. Metaphors, similes, and expressions from Andalusian popular speech, combined with literary interjections, create a layered effect. Exclamatory changes in tone, hyperbolic expressions, and linguistic resources emphasize authority, a central theme of the play. Exclamatory intonation, ellipsis, interjections, imperative verbs (expressing mandates and future obligations), emphasized vocatives, and pithy phrases all contribute to this effect.
Style of Miguel Hernández
Hernández’s language possesses a strong, passionate, and deeply human tone. His words seem to flow directly from the heart. His boundless inspiration is carefully structured, achieving a balance between emotion and poetic restraint. He employs parallelistic structures, correlations, antitheses, anaphora, and other devices for expressive efficiency. Hernández’s work demonstrates an evolution from early imitation of admired poets like Zorrilla, Bécquer, Espronceda, Gabriel y Galán, Vicente Medina, and Rubén Darío to the development of his own poetic voice. His early compositions reflect these influences, particularly in his landscape prints of Orihuela.
El rayo que no cesa
This collection explores life, love, and death, particularly love as a tragic feeling. The book’s architecture is precise, with two groups of thirteen sonnets, framed by a poem in quatrains at the beginning, one in the center, and an elegy in chained triplets at the end, before a final sonnet serving as an epilogue. The classic sonnet form balances emotional overflow and verbal concentration. Hernández’s mastery lies in the hidden rigor of his work; the result appears effortless and natural, conveying the strength and warmth of his language. He achieves full maturity and personal emphasis, absorbing influences from poets like Garcilaso and Quevedo. He uses metaphors of love based on opposites (antithesis) to depict the lover’s passion and the beloved’s coldness. His imagery is vivid, sometimes violent, adding to the dramatic tone. The recurring symbol of the knife represents a fatal threat to love and life. The lemon becomes a symbol of death, while love is symbolized by a wound in the breast. Nature’s vocabulary, with its energetic and wounding imagery, adds to the forcefulness of his language. The melancholy of love transforms into a volcanic explosion, symbolized by the bull, a key figure in Hernández’s poetic universe, representing both nobility and the fate of death.
Viento del pueblo
This work addresses the Civil War’s impact on the poet and humanity. His focus shifts from lyricism to an epic tone, with poems of enthusiasm, lament, and curse. The appellative function of apostrophe prevails, as the poet identifies with the community. Traditional rhythms and romances coexist with broader, more solemn meters like the Alexandrine, blending the popular and the cultured.
El hombre acecha
Here, youthful ardor gives way to serenity. The language becomes more sober, intimate, and less rhetorical. The man, once a tiger with claws, becomes a source of creation, then a tool of hate and destruction. Symbols like the bull, tiger-claw, earth-mother, and prison train create a range of predominantly zoomorphic or degrading objectifications of people and feelings. Light and water are positive symbols, along with fire, representing purification and regenerative fecundity. Blood has a dual, also positive, value.
Style of Antonio Machado (Holy Innocents)
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