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Juan Ramón Jiménez

Juan Ramón Jiménez (December 24, 1881May 29, 1958) was a Spanish poet. He was born in Moguer, near Huelva in the Andalusia region of Southern Spain. He made the region famous with his prose poem about a writer and his donkey, called Platero y Yo (1914). He was a prolific poet and wrote several dozen books. One of his most important contributions to modern poetry was the idea of "poesia pura," or pure poetry. He fled to Puerto Rico in 1936. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1956.


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Biography

Born in Moguer Jiménez studied law at the University of Seville, which he declined to put to use. Strongly influenced by the poet Rubén Darío, in 1900 he published his first two books. The death of its father in this same year affected him deeply and the resulting depression led to his being sent to a mental institution in France. Ten years later, he was transferred to the Sanatorio de El Rosario in Madrid. Soon afterwards, he made several trips to France and the United States, where in 1916 he married one Zenobia Camprubí, a noted translator of the Indian writer Rabinandrath Tagore. Zenobia became his indispensable companion and collaborator. After the beginning of Spanish Civil War he was exiled with Zenobia to Cuba, the U.S.A. and Puerto Rico. In 1946, Jiménez had to be hospitalized for eight months due to another deep depression. In 1956, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Three days later, his wife died of breast cancer. Jiménez never quite recuperated from this loss and died two years afterwards, in the exact same clinic as his wife. Both he and his wife were buried in Spain.

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1881 births | 1958 deaths | Spanish-language poets | Nobel laureates in Literature | Spanish Nobel Prize winners

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