De la nueva luz: en torno a la poesía última de Juan Ramón Jiménez (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: De la nueva luz: en torno a la poesía última de Juan Ramón Jiménez Jonathan Mayhew Juliá, Mercedes. De la nueva luz: en torno a la poesía última de Juan Ramón Jiménez. Huelva, Sp.: Diputación Provincial de Huelva, 2010. 166 pp. De la nueva luz approaches the late poetry of Juan Ramón Jiménez from several angles, critical, biographical, and comparative. The ten chapters comprising this book were written on separate occasions, and seven of them were published separately in shorter versions. The first section of the book, “Hacia otra desnudez,” approaches Juan Ramón’s poetry and life on their own terms, while the second, “Afinidades e influencias,” employs a comparative method, relating the poet to other significant figures, including his wife Zenobia Camprubí. Given the way in which this book has taken shape, there are some unnecessary repetitions of ideas and textual examples, but these are minor distractions in an otherwise well-conceived book. There is no question that Professor Juliá, the author and editor of previous volumes on Juan Ramón, is in a position to speak with authority about his poetic achievement. Her erudition and her admiration for the poet are evident on virtually every page of the book, as she strives to defend him against certain persistent misconceptions or caricatures of his personality. She is particularly anxious to remove Juan Ramón from his ivory tower, emphasizing his engagement with the outside world during his exile years. At the same time, she never denies that he was also a difficult individual whose conduct often alienated others. The author writes with admirable clarity and concision throughout, making this [End Page 329] book potentially accessible even to undergraduate Spanish majors. While some critics attempt to problematize everything, Mercedes Juliá works in the opposite direction, clarifying complicated issues. As a critic of the first type myself, I sometimes found her approach frustrating. I did not find significant points of disagreement with her interpretation of Juan Ramón’s works (which she knows much better than I do), but I felt that she could have explored some topics in greater depth. I do, however, concur with her profession of critical pluralism: “Así la actitud del crítico sensible es una aproximación a la obra del poeta de Moguer en un proyecto que queda abierto a otras lecturas y enfoques, como proceso inacabable que va de la apreciación primera hacia otras más profundas y abarcadoras” (15). The quality of the individual chapters is somewhat uneven, although even the weakest parts offer valuable insights and information. The first chapter, “Las sucesivas transformaciones de la lírica juanramoniana,” serves as an excellent introduction to the rest of the book, although offering little new for the specialist reader. I would recommend this chapter for students approaching the poetry of Juan Ramón for the first time, since it gives a very lucid explanation of the three major periods of his development. Chapter 5, “La prosa edificante de Tiempo,” one of the longest in the book, gives a masterful and detailed explication of one of Jiménez’s major works of his later period. This chapter, together with chapters 3 and 4 (“Ámbitos americanos en el simbolismo último” and “En torno a dios y a la inmanencia modernista”), is, in my judgment, the most substantial part of the book, the part most likely to be cited by subsequent critics. These three essays provide clearly conceived and efficient approaches to significant and problematic aspects of Juan Ramón’s poetics. Some of the comparative studies in the second half of the book are not as tightly focused. The enumeration of parallels with the life and work of George Santayana moves rapidly from topic to topic. The similarities between the two men are suggestive, but the author should do a bit more with them. We do not learn until the end of the chapter that Juan Ramón was actually a reader of Santayana. It might have been preferable to begin with the poet’s own reaction to the philosopher, contextualizing their similarities in light of this direct connection. A comparison between Platero...