"Lorca's reconquest of the Spanish public, and his growing prestige among scholars is a relatively recent phenomenon. When his works began to recirculate freely, many people who knew only the 'Gypsy Ballads' and two or three of the more popular plays considered Lorca a poet of limited interest and local color.
"When his later poetry and experimental plays such as 'The Public' came to be better known and understood, attitudes changed. 'Today,' observed Jose Luis Cano, a literary critic and biographer of Lorca, 'Lorca's reputation and popularity have soared, and they are based primarily on 'Poet in New York', Lorca's harrowing account of the year he spent in America. It is now recognized as one of the great monuments of 20th-century poetry'."
Source: New York Times, October 19, 1980