God Desired and Desiring

“The development of my poetry has been and is the development of an encounter with an idea about God,” the great Spanish poet and Nobel Prize winner Juan Ramón Jiménez wrote several years before his death. An early twentieth-century pioneer in the use of free verse, Jiménez has always expressed himself through mystery and profundity. Jiménez presents a fervent landscape of primordial imagery in an attempt to restore mystical poetry to its rightful place in literature and art.For anyone not familiar with the writings of this modern master, these austere and radiant poems in God Desired and Desiring, translated by the poet and scholar Antonio de Nicolás and presented alongside the original Spanish, will demonstrate why Jiménez is considered one of the masters of twentieth-century poetry. To what may this writing be compared? Whitman’s Song of Myself comes to mind, but it is not with any intention of taking away from Whitman’s achievement that I declare a preference for the poetry of Juan Ramón Jiménez.