Baladas y Odas

Already converted into one of the most prominent references of Hispanic modernism, the young Juan Ramón composed an enormous amount of prose texts that he will keep in his archives. The appearance of Platero and I in 1914 gives a good account of the quality of these prose, most of which were written during his retirement in Moguer between 1906 and 1912, but this great book will not be a unique or isolated achievement. In parallel, two extensive collections of poems were born that he titled Ballads for Later and Free Odes, the latter group that he would later add to Caste Odes under the generic heading Odes. Under the care of Soledad González Ródenas, this volume overcomes the deficient posthumous compilations and offers a reliable organization of its contents, which takes into account the indications noted by the poet for its edition and recovers a good number of unpublished compositions, expanding the corpus to now known. Both books represent the earliest and most important incursion of Spanish poetry into the debated genre of the "prose poem". In them JRJ avoids the decadent melancholy and the gloomy tones of his contemporary verses to delve into inflections that range from the erotic to the humorous, including the colloquial, the anecdotal or the pictorial. With these brief and sparkling prose he will also compose a lyrical autobiography where he unrestrictedly captures the dalliances -more carnal than sentimental- that he had with different women, and which were only put to an end by his decisive meeting in 1913 with Zenobia.