Lorca’ series of poems collected under the title Poeta en Nueva York present the reader with an often harrowing condemnation of big city life and its alienating consequences. Yet there is something disconcerting about this outsider’ attack on a city he knew relatively little about and in which he resided for less than a year (between June 1929 and March 1930) in circumstances that can only be described as comfortable. The anguished tones of Lorca’ New York poems are symptomatic, no doubt, of his outrage at the excesses and injustices of capitalist society – sentiments that are anticipated in his ‘Oda al Santísimo Sacramento del Altar’ (OC, I, pp. 960–9), in which he ‘bitterly attacks the ambit of cities, a world against nature, a world of alienation, of massiveness dwarfing the human individual, of moral disorientation and oppression’. We might even attribute his feelings to an intense culture shock experienced by someone for whom life in the vast metropolis was essentially alien; and yet the poet’ letters to his family during his stay seem to undermine the image of a lost or outraged soul constantly at odds with a hostile and merciless world. What is more, in a rather ambivalent letter to his friend, the Chilean diplomat Carlos Morla Lynch, written only days before he was due to set off on his travels, Lorca suggests that it was actually his preconceived dislike of New York which had informed his decision to go there in the first place: ‘Estoy en Madrid dos días,’ he wrote, ‘para ultimar unas cosas y en seguida salgo para París-Londres, y allí embarcaré a New York. ¿Te sorprende? A mí también me sorprende. Yo estoy muerto de risa de la decisión. Pero me conviene y es importante en mi vida.’ And he added: ‘New York me parece horrible, pero por eso mismo me voy allí. Creo que lo pasaré muy bien’ (EC, p. 611).