CRITICS HAVE POINTED to the difficulty, even the senselessness, of looking for coherence across Lorca's work. ‘My working hypothesis’, writes Mayhew (2009, pp. 3–4), ‘is that Lorca is an internally contradictory figure rather than a transparently cohesive one. It is extraordinarily difficult to arrive at a global sense of who he really was, of what his work, taken together, might signify.’ As regards Lorca's life specifically, Stephen Roberts (p. 9), in his recent biography, reminds us of some of the contradictions and ambiguities, including the fact that he could be a friend both to Manuel Azaña, the Liberal-Socialist President of the Republic, and to José Antonio Primo de Rivera, eldest son of General Primo de Rivera, and founder of the Fascist Falange.

In some respects, our study of Lorca under the various motifs of the Gitano, the modern and the feminist acknowledges the possibility that there is no single Lorca to be had, whether in terms of the life he experienced or his thematic interests. Even his reluctant and inconsistent engagement with the principles of the avant-garde reveals a Lorca who is often in two minds. And yet it would be disingenuous not to admit that we have, nonetheless, stubbornly sought to find some coherence across his most popular works, both in his reluctance to surrender to the principles of impersonality and irrationality in art and in the fact that he so often chose to tell stories about the real worlds of the marginalized and the oppressed.

Romancero gitano is an attempt to revitalize the traditional Spanish ballad. Lorca's decision to take on the ballad form and do so preserving the Gitano as its central motif was a bold one because of the hackneyed associations the form had acquired and the clichés about Gitanos it traditionally conveyed. Tackling the ballad necessarily meant tackling the clichés too. This he did by creating for his Gitanos mythical scenarios infused with lyricism and built upon complex metaphors. In this way, the poetic qualities of his ballads rescued them from the commonplaces often associated with the tradition. Which is why Lorca expressed surprise and dismay at Dalí's and Buñuel's criticism of his ballad book, made precisely on the grounds that his ballads had little new to offer.