Lorca's execution cast a long shadow over the critical reaction to The Diván at Tamarit, and because of Francisco Franco's oppressive regime, it was decades before the poems could be openly discussed in Spain. As Andrew Anderson writes in his 1990 study Lorca's Late Poetry: A Critical Study, "much of the early Lorca criticism can be characterized, with some notable exceptions, as impressionistic, clichéd and superficial." Writing in his book García Lorca, Edwin Honig agrees that critics in England and the United States "sought either to make political capital of his tragic death, or introduce certain of his poems as examples of Spanish surrealism . . . [and] Lorca was neither a 'political' nor a 'surrealist' poet."

If critics were prone to mislead Lorca's readers in the years following his death, however, they did not tarnish his reputation. The international community largely reacted to...