Dámaso Alonso

Dámaso Alonso (Madrid, 1898–Madrid, 1990) was a Spanish poet, philologist and literary critic. He is usually linked to the Generation of '27 as a critic, while his own poetry belongs to the first generation of post-war Spanish poets. He matters because he worked in two fields at once, writing poems and studying the language and poetry of Spain's Golden Age, and his scholarship on Góngora remains widely read.

He was the son of a mining engineer, and his father died when he was still a child. He was educated in Madrid and at the Augustinian school at El Escorial. His family hoped he would become an engineer, but eye trouble led him to study Law, a subject he disliked, and then Philosophy and Literature at the Central University, where he earned his doctorate in 1928 with a study of Góngora's syntax. At the Residencia de Estudiantes and the Centro de Estudios Históricos he came to know Lorca, Buñuel, Dalí and Alberti. Periods of teaching and study abroad took him to Berlin, Cambridge, the United States, Oxford and Leipzig.

His early poetry drew on Rubén Darío and Juan Ramón Jiménez, but his best-known work came after the Spanish Civil War. His critical edition of Góngora's Soledades and his studies of the culteranist style made him a leading figure in stylistic criticism, which tried to explain a poem through its own expressive choices. In Children of Wrath he gave voice to a anguished, existential poetry shaped by postwar disillusion and by a search for God tinged with fear.

During the Civil War he lived in Valencia and wrote for the journal Hora de España. After the war he was appointed to the chair of Romance Philology in Madrid in 1941, where he trained scholars such as Fernando Lázaro Carreter and Bartolomé Llorens. He joined the Real Academia Española in 1945 and led it from 1968 to 1982. He received the Cervantes Prize in 1978.

His legacy lies in the combination of postwar poetry with a rigorous philology that transformed the study of the Baroque. He is remembered as much for his poems as for the generations of scholars he taught.