Dámaso Alonso is generally recognized as a major literary critic of contemporary Spain, and as the founder of a whole school of stylistic analysis. At the same time he is considered an important poet who, having started his career by writing "pure" and somewhat abstract verse, changes his style after the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939 and takes the lead in a movement toward a direct and anguished "human" poetry.

This characterization of Alonso as a poet of two styles, though in many respects correct, does not take into account the fundamental cohesiveness of his literary production. If we examine all of his verse, for example, we can see that in spite of certain external differences between his early and his late books of poetry, all of them deal with the same general themes and make use of similar devices. All of them, for example, offer a dual...