Figuring Modernity: Juan Ramon Jimenez and the Baudelairian Tradition of the Prose Poem

Abstract

T HE PROSE POEMS of Juan Ram6n Jimenez's (1881-1958) Diario de un poeta recidn casado (1917), the landmark inititation of his segunda 6poca of poetic creation, frequently provoke critical perplexity. The uneven tone and quality of these works, in which he abandons Decadentism to cultivate his desnuda, and their often jarring difference from the surrounding verse prompted the poet himself to suggest separating Diario's prose and verse (Michael P. Predmore, La poesia 12-13). Yet the circumstances that surround Jimenez's generic substitution (of prose for verse) help us better to understand the genre of the prose poem historically, both as the result of the modern poet's desire to transform poetic expression and as poetic vision in reaction to bourgeois realism (Suzanne Bernard 97). These circumstances also permit us to consider the prose poem in relation to the experience of the modern city. For such a consideration, Tzvetan Todorov reminds us, It is natural to begin with Baudelaire. He is not the inventor of the form ... but it was he