Autograph letter signed (“Leonard”) to Marianne Ihlen ("My darling Marianne"), Miami, 30 March 1961.

Two pages, 305 x 182mm, aerogram.

In pursuit of García Lorca and a revolution of his own. He writes here from Miami, en route to Havana—“I’ve come down here against the advice of my friends because I want to see for myself what a Communist revolt looks like.” Cohen had discovered Spanish poet Federico García Lorca and his Selected Poems at the age of 15 and began to write seriously the following year. His first book, Let Us Compare Mythologies, contained poetry produced during this period, and he would later say that Lorca "led me into the racket of poetry. He educated me" (qtd in Nadel, p.23). He would honor the poet further by naming his daughter Lorca, and his 1986 song "Take This Waltz" would set García Lorca's "Pequeño vals vienés" to music.

There has been a brief hiatus in Marianne and Leonard's correspondence and he assures her that she has been in his thoughts. Their relationship seems to be at what would become a familiar crossroads: he wants to be alone, yet misses her terribly. “You wrote something which was so honest and lovely that it made me cry. It was: ‘And you must let me bring the rest of me to you, or give back what you have.' Do you remember? I don’t know what to say to you. I do not know what will happen to us. I wish I could say, ‘come with me, live with me,’ but I can’t—or maybe I can. Right now my solitude is necessary. I am lonely for you and I have never been happier than when I was with you…”

By descent from Marianne Ihlen.