La Poesia De Juan Ramon Jimenez

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1951.

Juan Ramon Jimenez (1881-1958) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1956, yet his work remains far less well-known in the English-speaking world than it deserves. Jimenez was a prolific writer - his collected verse fills twenty volumes - and his early poems were first published whilst still in his teens. During the early twentieth century Jimenez wrote and published voraciously and was very active within Spanish-speaking literary circles. In 1939, he left Spain for America, eventually settling in Puerto Rica until his death in 1958. It is difficult to hang a label on Jimenez' work, for his influences were many and his output vast. These selected poems, published here in English and the original Spanish, give the reader a chance to explore this remarkable talent.

The Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881–1958; Nobel laureate 1956) wrote at a key moment in literary history. Since Jiménez’s lyrical output covers the poetic tradition from Romanticism through Symbolism to the Avant-Gardes, his work can be regarded as a condensation of the modern paradigm. Julio Jensen investigates the lyrical subject appearing in Jiménez’s poetry as exemplary of the notion of modern subjectivity. He does so by assuming a historical correlation between literature and philosophy in the sense that if philosophical discourse conceptualizes the prevailing understanding of the human being at a given moment, literary discourse represents it. Modern thought does not accept any other foundation than subjectivity. At the same time, the awareness of the subject’s finitude engenders pessimism with respect to its status as world-generating principle. One of the primary aims of this study, then, is to show how Jiménez poignantly enacts this vacillation between self-enthronement and self-eradication. With insightful readings of Jiménez’s poetry, the author opens a rich vein in the work of a writer who would serve as a central reference for later Spanish-language poets such as Federico Garcá Lorca, Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz.