Jiménez, Juan Ramón (1881-1958)

Spanish lyric poet. Born in Andalusia, he left Spain during the civil war to live in exile in Puerto Rico. His essentially mystical and highly sophisticated work includes Sonetos espirituales (1915), Diario de un poeta recién casado (1916), and Dios deseado y deseante. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1956.

His early poems were much influenced by French Symbolist poetry, and are characterized by a verbal sumptuousness culminating in the Sonetos espirituales. Marriage and a sea journey in 1916 radically altered his poetic language, characterized thereafter by an extreme bareness of form and vocabulary, and a growing Platonic mysticism, notably in Diario de un poeta recién casado, Pedro y cielo (1919), and La estación total (1946). Another sea journey towards the end of his life revealed to him an idea of God as fulfilled human ‘consciousness’, and produced the two impressive, though obscure, volumes Animal de fondo and Dios deseado y deseante (1949). He is also remembered for a charming account of travels with a donkey, Platero y yo (1914).