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This essay examines the politics of poetic form in Juan Ramón Jiménez’s Diario de un poeta reciencasado (1917), specifically, the manner in which the work’s heterogeneous composition of prose poems and verse lyrics engenders conflicting ontologies for the lyric subject, marked by both transcendental desire and existential dread. Whereas Juan Ramón’s verse poems follow a symbolist tradition in which the poetic symbol becomes a site of transcendence of the material and temporal world, the prose poem challenges this project by bringing the symbol into contact with the social and the historical. In other words, while the lyric poems of the Diario work to bring about a transcendental union of the lyric voice and the world of atemporal divine essence, the clash between poetry and prose that defines the prose poem dramatizes an irresolvable conflict between transcendental longing and historical rootedness. Finally, this article proposes that this conflict structures not only the Diario’s prose poems, but the entirety of the collection itself, which in turn allows the Diario to be read not as a work of transcendental symbolism, but as an allegory of the divided subject, defined by the irreconcilable forces of transcendental yearning and historical consciousness.
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