Diary of a newlywed poet: A master’s masterpiece

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to reflect on a work that made Nobel Prize winner Juan Ramón Jiménez universally famous. His Diary embodied a new way of producing literature that would render previous ways of writing in Spanish obsolete. The combination of verse and prose, the use of free verse, the author’s physical and spiritual travels across the Atlantic Ocean —in search of Zenobia in order to marry her— as well as his return to Spain, immerses us in a wave of 243 poems in verse and in prose, in which we are invited to share the poet’s own experience. In this paper, we will be showing a polyhedral work, with many angles. The poet, while discovering the sea’s thousand faces, was gradually discovering himself as a new Juan Ramón in his personal as well as poetic life. This is the reason why this paper focuses on a work published in 1916 and that marked a milestone in Hispanic literature, and which until today remains paradigmatic in the art of excellent writing.