Juan Ramón Jiménez: most important works

One of the best known authors of the contemporary Spanish literature is Juan Ramón Jiménez, in fact, this author won the Nobel Prize for Literature and from his pen we were able to read one of the most beautiful and poetic works they have our lyrics: Platero and Yo. Due to the importance of this author and his exquisite literary style, in this lesson from a PROFESSOR we have wanted to do a review by the most important works of Juan Ramón Jiménez. A journey through the universe of Hispanic letters that will show us the most outstanding titles of the author's production.

Index

1. The generation of Juan Ramón Jiménez
2. Juan Ramón Jiménez - Platero y yo: the author's masterpiece (1914)
3. Diary of a newly married poet (1916)
4. The sonorous loneliness of Juan Ramón Jiménez
5. Characteristics of the poetry of Juan Ramón Jiménez

Before starting to talk about the most important works of Juan Ramón Jiménez in his career, we are going to do a brief review of his life and, thus, learn about a subject that has been strongly debated: what is the generation of Juan Ramón Jimenez?

The first thing we should know is that we are dealing with a poet who is well known for having cultivated an exquisite style full of intensity. In 1956 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, an award that paid tribute to all his literary work but, above all, making a special mention of his most consecrated work: Platero y Yo.

It is difficult to classify Juan Ramón Jiménez in a generation because the author had different creative and poetic stages that were very different from each other.

Stages of the literature of Juan Ramón Jiménez

Experienced critics tend to divide Juan Ramón Jiménez's work into 3 stages clearly differentiated. This stylistic division has made it really difficult to establish a generation for the author since, Depending on the moment of his life that we analyze, we can find the tendency towards one style or another. The stages are:

1. Sensitive stage (from 1989 to 1915): It is the modernist stage of Juan Ramón Jiménez. The author drank from the influence of Bécquer, from symbolism and from Literary modernismFor this reason, we find texts in which there is an important presence of the landscape, melancholy and idealized memories abound. An emotional poetry where the poet masters the structure of his creations to the maximum.
2. Intellectual stage (from 1916 to 1936): It is the author's stage of maturity and, in it, we find a very important symbol in his aesthetics, the symbol of the sea. At this moment in his literary production, the sea adopts a transcendent symbolism since it embodies ideals such as life, loneliness, eternity, and so on. Juan Ramón Jiménez now lives a more spiritual and metaphysical stage in which he wants to reach eternity with a refined and beautiful poetry.
3. True stage (from 1937 to 1958): it is the stage in which the author goes into exile due to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Here we find a change in the energy of his work, a sadder and more desolate voice because of the situation in his country. Furthermore, it is in this period when the author will suffer the death of his wife, Zenobia, a death that will profoundly mark his life. For all these facts, the poet begins to cultivate a more mystical poetry in an incessant search for God and comfort. A more introspective and desperate poetry is what we find in the last stage of the author.

Image: Slideplayer

We are going to talk about the most important works of Juan Ramón Jiménez to mention the most important work of his career: Platero and I. It's about a story loaded with poetry and what does he tell us the life of a donkey that responds to the name of Platero. During the book we witness different scenes that present us with the daily life of this protagonist without the stories having a temporal or chronological relationship. The narrative space is shared by all the stories, a space that places us in Moguer, the town where Juan Ramón Jiménez lived during his childhood.

Platero and I is a publication that appeared in 1914 and that it is aimed at adult readers; However, due to the presentation of the work and its character, the story was also read by children, achieving great global success. In the pages of the book we find that the author criticizes Spanish society in a sharp and satirical way.

But what is most striking about this work and the reason why it is the best valued by Juan Ramón Jiménez is for his literary style. At all times we find stories in which there is a exquisite language selection and where the vocabulary is exuberant and even invented. Studies abound on the neologisms in Platero y Yo, words that the author created to define the dream world in which his protagonist lived. A very poetic and refined style that conquers from the first minute and from which it is difficult to detach. Here is a clear example:

A girl, broken and dirty, was crying on a wheel, wanting to help the little donkey with the push of her flower breast, smaller, oh, and skinnier than Platero. And the donkey was dispatched against the wind, trying, uselessly, to tear the wagon out of the mud, to the sobbing cry of the little girl. His effort was in vain, like that of brave children, like the flight of those tired summer breezes that fall, in a faint, among the flowers.

Image source: Editorial Susaeta

Image: Editorial Susaeta

Diary of a newly married poet It is another of the most important and studied works of Juan Ramón Jiménez. It is a text that appears after the author traveled to America for the first time and came into contact with english authors like Dickinson, Yeats or Shelley. This work is embedded in the second stage of the author and literature scholars classify it within the literary current of the Novecentismo or the Generation of 14.

It is from his trip to America that the author takes the idea of sea ​​as a symbol of transcendence human. For his aesthetic and poetic conception, the sea begins to symbolize life, loneliness, eternity... And this will strongly mark this stage in which the author will begin to cultivate a more spiritual and metaphysical type of poetry. He refined his poetics and began to strip his style of all the elements of Modernism: musicality, ornamentality and abundance. He now he began to write deeper, simpler and purer texts: the beauty of simplicity is what seems to predominate now in his texts and Diary of a newly married poet is a clear example of this.

In this publication the author began to experiment with new literary forms and to talk about new topics that were the basis of some Generation of 27 authors. The work tells us the experiences that the author himself had during his journey across the sea to reach New York, a journey that marked him deeply and that took place on the occasion of his own wedding: he was going to marry Zenobia.

For the poet himself, this diary is his best book because it consists of a text that mixes lyric with prose in an innovative and different way. The inspiration for this book is the sea and the immensity that the poet experienced when sailing in it for so many days. The work consists of 6 parts and 3 of them talk about the sea, therefore, it is considered that he is the protagonist of the book.

The sonorous loneliness is another of the best works of Juan Ramón Jiménez since it has poems that the author wrote from 1905 to 1912. This book is a compilation of all the poems written during this period of time during which the author retired to Moguer after having experienced a family crisis. The style of the poems shows us a Juan Ramón Jiménez with an exquisite lyric and with a strong influence of modernist aesthetics. Within the entire collection of poems they stand out "The sonorous loneliness", "Melancholy", "Labyrinth" and "Magical and suffering poems".

In these compositions we can see the author's personal style and his desire to transform life into images loaded with poetry. The stage in which this publication is included is the first of all, the modernist stage and that manages to achieve peace and wholeness by the mere fact of observing the beauty of nature.

This book is one of the most important in the career of Juan Ramón Jiménez because it shows us a poet who cultivates a unique and exquisite literary style. Is about a treasure of our literature that brings us closer to an author with his own personality and who, no matter how hard they try to classify, is unclassifiable.

To end this lesson on the most important works of Juan Ramón Jiménez, we did not want to leave to mention some characteristics of his poetry that make this author so unique and incomparable. Here we leave the outstanding features of his style:

• Subjectivity: the author shows us his personal and subjective version of life and emotions
• Longing for perfection: the style so refined and worked is a reflection of the incessant search for perfection that the author cultivated
• The importance of the "creative self": for the author, the figure of the poet has great importance and he presents it as a god, as the creator of his own existence
• Contemplation: Juan Ramón Jiménez's poetry is a contemplative poetry in which he can reach the knowledge of the truth and his own identity thanks to the observation of the environment
• Search for eternity: and, to achieve it, what he does is pursue beauty, penetrate it and know it thoroughly
• The beautiful from the ugly: Juan Ramón Jiménez's aesthetic is characterized by being a new aesthetic in which everything can be susceptible to becoming beauty

Some poems by Juan Ramón Jiménez

Beautiful death

What are you going to hurt me, death?

Does life not hurt?

Why should I be more daring

for living outside

that for the deep to die?

The earth what is that not the air?

Why should it suffocate us,

why should it blind us,

why should it crush us,

why should he shut us up?

Why must die be

what we say die,

and live just live,

what we shut up live?

Why true dying

(what we shut up dying)

it must not be sweet and soft

like real living

(what do we say live?)

I'm not me

I'm not me.

I am this

that goes by my side without me seeing it,

that, sometimes, I will see,

and that sometimes I forget.

The one who is silent, serene, when I speak,

the one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,

the one who walks where I am not,

the one that will remain standing when I die.

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