Juan Ramón Jiménez

Juan Ramón Jiménez was born in 1881 in Moguer, a small Andalusian town near Huelva. He was educated by the Jesuits at El Puerto de Santa María and began studies in law and painting in Seville before giving himself entirely to poetry. His first books appeared in 1900, written under the spell of Rubén Darío and the French Symbolists. The death of his father that year plunged him into a depression that led to stays in France and in a Madrid sanatorium — the beginning of a lifelong vulnerability that shadowed his work.

His early verse is musical and melancholy, alive to colour and landscape. Platero and I, a sequence of prose poems about a man and his donkey in Moguer, became one of the most loved books in the Spanish language. In 1916 he married Zenobia Camprubí in New York, and the sea voyage there produced Diary of a Newly Married Poet, in which he abandoned ornament for free verse and a bare, intense concentration. He called the ideal he sought ‘naked poetry’: the word made exact, the self dissolved into the essential. His example was decisive for the younger poets of the Generation of ’27.

When the Spanish Civil War began he went into exile with Zenobia, his indispensable collaborator, living in Cuba, the United States and finally Puerto Rico, where he taught at the university. His late poetry turned toward a personal mysticism. The Nobel Prize was announced in 1956 just days before Zenobia’s death; he never recovered from the loss and died in San Juan in 1958. Both are buried in Moguer.