A leap in the dark. Reading Juan Ramón Jiménez after Diario de un poeta reciéncasado

Abstract

This paper is a proposal of a reading of Juan Ramón Jiménez’s poetry starting from Diario de un poeta reciencasado (1917) based on the conceptual metaphor of “escape” (fuga in the poet’s words). So, the conceptual metaphor, a main topic in cognitive semantics, is presented as a useful tool in order to explain not only the process of reading a text but also its poetics, implicit as well as explicit. If applied to Juan Ramón Jiménez’s poetry, this conceptual metaphor can account for his new idea of poetic form by comparing it with a dynamic force which escapes from closed patterns and creates a poetry of the consciousness always renovating itself.