Dámaso Alonso worked simultaneously across different fields: literary creation and research, criticism and historical studies, stylistics, the poetry of Spanish classics, popular poetry, the jarchas, and authors such as Luis de Góngora, Saint John of the Cross, and Gil Vicente.
He was the author of a groundbreaking study on Spanish Baroque poetry, characterised by exceptional intellectual rigour and precision: La lengua poética de Góngora (The Poetic Language of Góngora; Madrid, CSIC, 1961) and Ensayos sobre poesía española (Essays on Spanish Poetry, 1944).
Although he is considered a poet of the Generation of ’27, his best-known works were written after 1940. Alonso often referred to himself as a “poet of periods of inspiration”.
Among his poetic works are Poemas puros: poemillas de la ciudad (Pure Poems: Little Poems of the City; Madrid, Galatea, 1921); El viento y el verso (The Wind and the Verse; Madrid, 1925); Oscura noticia (Dark News; Madrid, Adonais Collection, 1944); Hombre y Dios (Man and God; Málaga, 1995); Hijos de la ira (Children of Wrath; Madrid, 1944); Antología de nuestro monstruoso mundo, duda y amor sobre el Ser Supremo (The Anthology of Our Monstrous World, Love and Doubt about the Supreme Being; Madrid, Cátedra, 1985); and Álbum: versos de juventud (Album: Youth Verses; Barcelona, Tusquets, 1993).
Alongside his own literary work, Alonso dedicated himself to introducing major contemporary European writers to Spanish-speaking audiences. He was the first translator into Spanish of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Retrato del artista adolescente), a project he carried out with Joyce’s collaboration in 1924 and which was published by Biblioteca Nueva in Madrid in 1926.
A member of the Royal Spanish Academy (Real Academia Española) from 1945, he served as its director from 1968 to 1982. He was also a member of numerous other associations and academies, including the Royal Academy of History and the Modern Language Association, and served as President of the Association of Hispanists.
His main work as director of the Royal Spanish Academy focused on organising meetings with Latin American academies, collaborating with them to prevent the fragmentation of the Spanish language.
The Library of the Royal Spanish Academy in Madrid has a special section dedicated to Dámaso Alonso, containing more than 40,000 volumes from his personal library, publications of his own works, and personal documents.
The Instituto Cervantes Library in Dublin, which bears his name, holds a significant collection of his works, as well as copies of some of his personal documents, including a letter from James Joyce concerning the translation of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
His outstanding contribution to Spanish philology and literature was recognised with prestigious awards, including the National Literature Prize in 1927, the Fastenrath Prize in 1943, the National Essay Prize in 1969, and the Cervantes Prize in 1978, the latter being considered the highest literary recognition in the Spanish language.
He also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Bordeaux, Freiburg, Granada, Hamburg, Lisbon, Oxford, Oviedo, and Rome, as well as from the National University of San Marcos in Lima, Peru. His intellectual work continued until his death in Madrid in 1990.
