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WHILE Juan Ramon Jimenez was brought into popular prominence by Platero y yo and has published literary criticism, aphorisms, and even class notes, his undisputed lifelong avocation and profession was that of poet. It is surely for his lyric poetry that Juan Ramon was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1956, that streets are named after him, and that the two-thousand peseta note bears his likeness.(1) Poets, we expect, write poems. Conceivably already entertaining just such an expectation, Juan Ramon signed his brief preface to Platero y yo with the antonomastic self-designation of "El poeta." The epithet puts a spin on the narrative that, to understate the case, has not discouraged receptions which invoke and proclaim its lyricality.
No such spin is required where the first lineated versions of "Espacio (3 estrofas)" are concerned.(2) The text was received as a poem from the moment its first strophe was published in lineated form; it is only after the much lengthier, unlineated version appeared in Poesia espanola in 1954 that some began to refer to it as a poema en prosa, others as a poema lirico or autobiografia lirica, and still others as prosa poetica (curiously, the generic neutrality of the substitute composicion often comes into play [see, for example, Ricardo Gullon, "Nota preliminar" 10, and Howard T. Young, "Genesis" 462] ). For Maria Teresa Font, the text is both an autobiografia lirica and a poema en prosa; for Aurora de Albornoz, it is "el maximo exponente de la <poesia en prosa> que, como sabemos, Juan Ramon venia buscando desde muchos anos atras" [Nueva 82]); for Mercedes Julia, "Espacio" is also "un poema en prosa" (Universo 41).(3) While the imprimatur of poetry lingers and outshines the generally unexplained mentions of prose and prose poetry throughout most critical references to "Espacio," the pervasiveness of these, together with other appellations, demands a careful reconsideration of its genre.
The Face and the Name
"Espacio" has not merely been universally received as a text whose poeticality (prose or lyrical) is taken as a given; it has also been lauded as the most important work of twentieth-century Hispanic poetry and as Juan Ramon's "capital text" (Paz 81);(4) it has been compared in importance to Mallarme's "Un coup de des" and T....