War & Peace Quote by Federico Garcia Lorca

Skyscrapers aren’t just buildings here; they’re overconfident verbs. Lorca turns modern architecture into a cosmic fistfight, and the line lands because it refuses the usual propaganda of progress. The city’s vertical ambition is “poetic” precisely because it stages a spectacle - human desire given a steel spine, reaching upward with almost religious fervor. It’s “terrible” because the same reach reads as defiance, even blasphemy: a technological attempt to elbow into the domain of the heavens that “cover” us, a word that makes the sky feel less like open possibility and more like a lid.

The subtext is Lorca’s suspicion that modernity doesn’t simply change the skyline; it changes the soul. In his New York writing (Poeta en Nueva York, forged from his 1929-30 stay), skyscrapers become a symbol of an inhuman system: finance, speed, hierarchy, the crushing anonymity of crowds. The “battle” suggests not triumph but futility and violence. Steel can climb, but it can’t conquer what the heavens represent: mystery, mercy, judgment, limits. That tension is the engine of the line.

Context matters: Lorca is a poet of duende, where beauty comes braided with dread. He’s also watching a world sliding toward catastrophe - economic collapse abroad, political fracture at home, his own eventual murder in Spain. So the skyscraper is not merely a modern marvel; it’s a monument to aspiration haunted by an oncoming sense that something immense, indifferent, and final still “covers” us.