FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA'S THEORY of the duende — that “mysterious
power,” the “fertile silt that gives us the very substance of
art” — places “struggle” rather than “thought” at the epicenter
of poetry. Duende, the energy Lorca felt animates real art, “is
not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood.”
Duende inheres; it cannot be attained. “In all the world, only
Mexico can take my country’s hand”: duende is a distinctly
Spanish affair, but it is also a question of, and for, lyric.
Lorca quotes from Cancionero Musical del Palacio, a Renaissance
songbook: “Dentro del vergel / moriré” (“In the garden / I will
die”). Whatever else it is or does, lyric stages an encounter
between a speaking voice and a listening other, directly
addressed (the apostrophe “you”) or implicit, overhearing. Art,
Lorca insists, comes not from the muse, and not from the angel,
but from the “black sounds” of the duende which inhabit the
writer’s body and, through her, the written poem. “Through the
empty arch comes a wind