Dell'Amico is an instructor of English literature and composition. In this essay, she considers Machado's poem about Federico García Lorca within the context of the characteristic elements of Machado's and Lorca's work.

Within a few years of the first publication of “The Crime Was in Granada,” Machado had died. As a poem written near the end of his life, it contains many elements typical of many other poems he wrote. Yet the way in which Machado incorporates typical qualities of Federico García Lorca's works, as a way of paying homage to his fellow writer, distinguishes this poem.

One of the tenets of Spain's Generation of '98, with which Machado is associated, was that the art of the new twentieth century should reflect the modernism of the era. For Machado, this meant ridding his poetry of typical nineteenth-century flourishes (adorned language) and syntactical (grammatical...