[What] best defines Alonso the critic is precisely his art of definition, his extraordinary ability to see and express the essential features of a literary object….

The principal mission, although not the only one, which he set for himself and which has guided his steps and enabled him to reach goals which no one before had achieved, was, from the historical point of view, a new understanding and evaluation of Spanish lyric poetry of the Golden Age in its embodiment of universal qualities; and from the critical point of view, the study of the literary work as a work of art in language. (p. 255)

[In] no other contemporary Spanish critic … have I ever found, to such a high degree and with such revealing fidelity, the desire and gift to define briefly and distinctly, in the way a definition should be made, the nature and essential traits of one...