Canciones, published in 1927, contains many poems that are contemporaneous with the Suites. Written between 1921 and 1925 (see Walters 2002, p. 136), they head similarly in the direction of syntactical simplification and the eradication of emotionalism, ‘towards an aesthetic’, as Walters (2002, p. 137) puts it, ‘that implied economy, understatement, detachment’. This minimalist approach contributes, as it did in both the Suites and Poema del cante jondo, to the independent character of poems that privilege metaphor over discursiveness. There is, once again, a ludic aspect in all this, combined also with a double perspective characterized by Walters as that of the child and the poet respectively. ‘To the child,’ writes Walters (2002, p. 143), ‘falls the role of sentient observer; to the poet belongs the role of registering, rationalizing, however minimal this may be.’ This perspective will no doubt have its psychological aspect, implicit in the collection’ ‘obsessive regard for the child’ world and the problems that arise on departing from it’ (Walters 2002, p. 251). Yet it also has important aesthetic consequences. For adopting the simple utterances of children facilitates the minimalist character of poems; while the naivety of the childlike perspective keeps at bay the needs and sensibilities of adult selfhood, thus contributing to the elimination of emotionalism and the project of depersonalization.

It would be a mistake, however, to think that Lorca was any more reconciled in Canciones with the precepts of impersonal art than he had been in his previous work. In a reader-oriented approach to the collection, Dennis Perri (1995, p. 190) identifies Canciones ‘as a space in which heterogeneity and diversity prevail’, a contributing factor being the very instability in the distance and tone of the speaker. ‘He appears’, writes Perri (1995, p. 190), ‘to be testing out methods and techniques for talking to the reader without ever sinking into exaggerated sentimentality, or concealing every trace of subjectivity.’ However, what Perri attributes to experimentation with method and technique might also be viewed as a struggle.