Born in 1898, and murdered by the Nationalist partisans in the early days of the Spanish Civil War, Lorca was, before the death of Franco, virtually a folk-hero in Spain and now is acknowledged as a national treasure and one the finest poets and dramatists in the language. As a poet, Lorca draw on Freudian symbolism, mythology and the Andalusian ballads and folk songs of his childhood to reconnect with the great themes of traditional Spanish poetry - love, sorrow and death - remaking them in his own modem idiom: an idiom that even today, in poems such as Lament for a the Death of a Bullfighter, encapsulates the spirit of this incredible country.