Lorca's ‘Agonía republicana’ and Its Aftermath

The afterlives of Federico Garcia Lorca are many. His violent death at the hands of the extreme right during the Civil War has been remembered and imagined in a variety of ways, thus bringing the Republican poet back to life in a strange kind of afterglow and symbolically completing his earthly trajectory. Republicans naturally claimed him for their own cause, but surprisingly, a few on the right made similar title to Lorca. I focus on that claim as part of the aftermath of the poet's death, re-examining some of the early right-wing reaction to Lorca's assassination, subsequent commentary, and one especially pertinent case, that of the South African poet, Roy Campbell. The aim is to shed more light on the motivation or circumstances that produced such claims and on the ideological contentiousness that so politicised Lorca's life and work.