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BIOGRAPHY
The Spanish poet Juan Ramon Jimenez was born December 23, 1881 n a small town in the part of Andulusia. Juan grew to become an intelligent man who attended the University of Seville where he studied law. This study of law lasted only a short while because of Juan's growing interests in painting and poetry. Juan started to write at the young age of 17 where some of his earliest poetry was published in the Madrid Review Vida nueva (new life). These poems caught the attention of the famous Spanish writers Ruben Dario and Francisco Villaespea. The two invited Juan to move to Madrid where his new found interest helped to influence many literary reviews and write many new poems. His earlier books of poetry, Almas de Violeta (violet souls) and Ninfeas (water lilies), demonstrated his use of metrical forms and his use of lyrical poetry. Just after returning to Moguer Juans' father, Victor Jimenez, died suddenly forcing Juan into a state of depression leaving him with an acquired morbid writing style that lasted him his entire life.
Juan moved to Madrid's Students' residence after his father's death and wrote the book Platero y yo (Plato and I) containing prose poems about the poet and his donkey. The change in his topics to poetry led him to write love poems about the woman Zenobia Camprubi whom he had fallen in love with and married. With his new marriage Jimenez found himself on a boat returning to New York. This voyage led to his writing of Dario which held the rhythm of the sea in its continual movement and solitude. For the next twenty years of his life Juan worked as a critic for various literary magazines in Spain. Juan "earnestly tried to communicate what he called an 'avidity for eternity'" (Wasson.\, 513). This goal lead to the creation of the book of poetry titled Eternidades. These poems are slender and stripped of the detail from his earlier works. Jimenez encountered a disruptance in his years work by the Spanish civil War where he was moved back to the United States by the Republican government. Here he and his wife remained for most of his life. In this feeling of aloneness left by his move Juan searched for truth. He found a spiritual intensity inside of himself that he expressed in his later work Animal de fondo. With one last move to San Juan, Puerto Rico, Juan and his wife settled and he continued teaching. Juan Ramon Jimenez was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1956 for his lyrical poetry, which expresses "high spirit and artistic purity" (Wasson, 513). He accepted his award thanking his dying wife for her help and companionship. With the death of his wife Juan slowly declined himself and died at the age of seventy-six. Juan Ramon Jimenez has been compared to William Butler Yeats and Ranier Maria Rilke. Just as them he has "espoused a secular religion in which poetry was the only rite, and its creation the only form of worship" (Wasson, 513).