Juan Ramón Jiménez: Life, Works and Poetic Style

Juan Ramón Jiménez: Life and Work

This great natural poet from Moguer (Huelva) was born in 1881. The death of his father in 1905 profoundly impacted the author's personality. Since then, he suffered periodic nervous depressions for which he was interned in various sanatoriums where he received proper psychiatric care. In 1911, he met Zenobia Camprubí, whom he married in New York in 1916. During the Spanish Civil War, he joined the Republican side and had to emigrate to America, where he remained until his death in 1958. Two years before, in 1956, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was a person who looked deeply at the time. Withdrawn and lonely, he rejected various honors, such as belonging to the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE). He represents the prototype of the poet removed from the world and dedicated to a permanent and intense creative process.

Poetic Evolution

Juan Ramón Jiménez started with simple poetry, short, intimate, and with a melancholy tone, showing the influence of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer. Arias Tristes (September 1, 1903) is the main volume of this phase.

Then, he adopted the modernist style, a fact that is perceived in the choice of a more ornamental poetry dominated by descriptions, colorful adjectives, and synesthesia. This central period, to which works such as The Sounding Solitude (1908) belong, culminates with the publication of his beloved and pure Platero y yo (1914), which immediately brought him great reputation both inside and outside of Spain.

Since 1916, the modernist style is abandoned to direct his interest in a pure or naked poetry that eliminates the unnecessary. It is, therefore, a poetry that essentially seeks to appoint the essential with as few words as possible. At this stage, more intellectual, which includes Diary of a Newlywed Poet (1917), Juan Ramón includes a number of innovations that demonstrate the close relationship between Modernism and the Novecentismo avant-gardes: English phrases, use of free verse, irony, etc.

Final Years and Legacy

His last phase coincided with his exile in Cuba, Miami, and Puerto Rico, where he died at seventy-seven years old. During this time, the author dazzled with poetry increasingly flowing into deep religiosity. To this period belongs God Desired and Desiring, where he identifies even the most intimate with the God he has sought so much.

Poetic Prose

In his effort to renew literary expression, Juan Ramón Jiménez wrote poetic prose works like Platero y yo. Poetic prose is a form of expression characterized by the communication of feelings, by the accumulation of literary figures, and by the presence of rhythmic and musical effects. Therefore, a text written in poetic prose is much closer to a lyric text in verse than to a narrative text in prose.

Platero y yo: An Andalusian Elegy

In Platero y yo, the author reveals his inner world through the descriptions that he confides in his donkey companion. The first version of the book consists of 63 chapters with autonomy. That is, the author leads us from one chapter to another without connecting the events. Each of these chapters or units is a poem used to tell, sometimes describe, and sometimes express pure lyricism. Maybe that's why Platero y yo was never described as a novel, but as "Andalusian elegy" by the writer himself.

Expressive Resources

The main expressive means that appear in the work are colorful adjectives, metaphors, comparisons, personifications, and synesthesia. Juan Ramón also used rhythm and musicality through the repetition of sounds (alliteration), words (anaphora), and syntactic structures (parallelisms).