Amado Alonso
(Lerín, Navarra, 1896 - Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1952)

Amado Alonso became a fellow at the Center for Historical Studies (CEH) in 1918, after completing his university studies. He studied in Germany between 1922-1924. Both Spanish and German influences marked his career: he endorsed the German ideas of language as a form of spirit and literature as the representation of a personal world through a style. He learnt from Menéndez Pidal the need to clarify the notion of national entity through philology.

His personal charm and physical demeanor contributed to his quick professional success: in 1927, he submitted an innovative doctoral dissertation entitled «Estructura de las “Sonatas” de Valle-Inclán» and became director of the Institute of Philology in Buenos Aires, the first outreach of the work of the CEH. He quickly created a brilliant school in Argentina, with Raimundo and María Rosa Lida, Angel Rosenblat, Ana María Barrenechea, Frida Weber, and others. He greatly contributed to the dissemination of the landmarks of modern linguistics and stylistics by translating the work of Karl Vossler and Leo Spitzer, and Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics. He wrote, with Pedro Henríquez Ureña, a splendid Gramática castellana (1938), and, although he never lost interest on Spanish subjects, (Castellano, español, idioma nacional. Historia espiritual de tres nombres was published in 1938), he often worked on Latin American themes (“El modernismo en La gloria de don Ramiro,” and Poesía y estilo de Pablo Neruda, 1940)

Shortly after the end of the Spanish Civil War and the exile of the best Spanish teachers, Amado Alonso created the Revista de Filología Hispánica, aiming to maintain the spirit of the periodical published with the same title by the extinct CEH. In 1946, the climate of intolerance in Perón’s Argentina made him move to Harvard University, where he founded -thanks to Raimundo Lida’s initiative- the Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, now linked to the Colegio de México. He died of cancer in 1952.His brilliant book, Materia y forma en poesía, which contained his best work on stylistics, was published in 1955 in Spain.