In an essay on one of his brother's plays, Francisco García Lorca points out that, although a ‘process of maturation is visible in the work of all artists’, there is no ‘clear line of evolution’ in Federico's work. ‘As a poet and as a playwright, what Federico undergoes is a continuous metamorphosis,’ rather than a clear evolution in any one direction. What he does is to ‘adapt technical procedures to artistic intentions that vary with every work’. Luis Fernández Cifuentes adds a further warning about sweeping generalizations: that Lorca's critics seem to be on a continual, reductive search for totality, continuity and unity in his work.

Despite these caveats, one does discover in Lorca's poetry – both lyrical and dramatic – certain constant thematic and stylistic elements. He is, to begin with, an elegiac poet who looks beyond presence into absence, often evoking not what is, but what is not, what was, or what might have been. Lorca is a poet of desire, rather than love; of longing, rather than fulfilment. As the American poet Robert Bly once wrote, García Lorca is always saying ‘what he wants, what he desires, what barren women desire, what water desires, what gypsies desire, what a bull desires just before he dies, what brothers and sisters desire’. Although one of his biographers, Ian Gibson, has written insistently of Lorca's poetry and theatre as an expression of ‘erotic frustration’ by a gay artist surrounded by intolerance and unable to express his desire openly, such an approach, which has found wide popular acceptance, restricts desire – erroneously, perhaps – to homoerotic desire, when it is really, in Lorca, a much more general phenomenon. If Lorca's characters had ‘followed the call of instinct’ rather than ‘yielding to socioeconomic pressures’, Gibson writes, ‘[their tragedies] would not have occurred’. On the contrary, the desire that is found everywhere in Lorca'spoetry and drama cannot be ‘frustrated’ for it has no identifiable object. To put it as broadly as possible: Lorca's poetic characters – both in his theatre and in his narrative poetry – cannot identify what it is that they want, and the poet often suggests that, even if they could, and could achieve those desires, they would be no ‘happier’: new desires would take their place.