Abstract

BOTH Damaso Alonso's verse and his vision of the nature of poetry seem to undergo a marked change between the late 1920s and the 1940s. Just as the formally exact and seemingly detached Poemas puros, poemillas de la ciudad give way to the human and existential Hijos de la ira, so a view of poetry which emphasizes its creation of a world different from our everyday one gives way to one which underlines the human meanings embodied by the poetic work. Excessive stress on these shifts, however, can easily lead us to ignore the basic unity of Damaso Alonso's poetry and of his poetic outlook, and in the process to miss some of the key meanings of his work. Elsewhere we have suggested that in his poetry Alonso presents successive and increasingly more complex and more essential versions of certain conflicts in outlooks on the world.' Our writer's poetic trajectory, we feel, can best be seen as the gradual enrichment of a single vision. And his view of the function of poetry represents a corresponding pattern: a fundamentally unified position is in time gradually developed, enriched, and adapted to circumstances and needs of particular times. Damaso Alonso has been described as taking a formalistic and dehumanized stance toward literature in the 1920s and 1930s, and as identifying poetry with the elaborate construction of a world removed from reality.2 There seems to be evidence for such a characterization: Alonso's interest in Gongora, his detailed stylistic studies, his praise of the exact intricacies of baroque poetry.3 Our author's very membership in the Generation of

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