Sincerity is not a virtue of modern poets, at least not where it implies total surrender to the lyrical impulse, to the need, the desire, to speak earnestly of oneself, to speak genuinely and directly of one’ unique, personal experience, albeit in a language that is necessarily not unique to one’ person but belongs equally to other poets. Over the course of the nineteenth century and into the Twentieth, the movement of poets was increasingly away from speaking as men to other men. ‘Poetry,’ Eliot concluded, ‘is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality,’ although he added that, ‘of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these things’. Irrespective of people’ natural curiosity about the lives of others, including, of course, the lives of writers, sincerity in art came to be considered artless, and we have come to feel as uncomfortable around the emotional outpourings of the lyric subject as we are around the unprompted personal revelations of a complete stranger. For if poets moved away from speaking to men as men, they turned instead to speaking as artists to other artists, to the initiated, the able, which is why the discomfort in face of such utter sincerity is shared in great part by those who are privy to the secrets of artful art, which no longer inhabits, as they see it, that most earnest of places. ‘There are many people’, wrote Eliot (1986, p. 59), ‘who appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in verse, and there is a smaller number of people who can appreciate technical excellence. But very few know when there is expression of significant emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal.’

The sincerity with which Lorca associates himself in his first letter to Adriano del Valle and which is apparent in his introductory words to Libro de poemas is precisely the element that he needed to expurgate en route to his becoming a poet of the day.