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Construction And Deconstruction: The Theme Of Fleetingness In Poems By Juan Ramón Jiménez, And Pedro Salinas, Andrew P. Debicki

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Both Juan Ramón Jiménez and Salinas reveal in their poems a striving to capture the essences of things, continuing in this quest a tradition coming to them from symbolist poetry. By examining several poems written by them, however, we discover a basic difference in their way of embodying this striving. Juan Ramón, concerned with the perfection of form, remains within a logocentric tradition in which the poem attempts to embody its meanings objectively; Salinas, on the other hand, writes poems the meanings of which evolve with successive readings and reflect the theme of reality's fleetingness. A close analysis of the …