Juan Ramón Jiménez, known simply as Juan Ramón in the Hispanic world, dominated Spanish poetry for the first three decades of the twentieth century, and at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 he was still a figure of influence and importance. Later, in exile in the United States and Puerto Rico, he expanded his already considerable influence, made the acquaintance of Robert Frost and Ezra Pound, and was greeted with a frenzy of enthusiasm on a trip to Buenos Aires in 1948. The unabashed and imperfectly assimilated modernism of Jiménez's first books yielded in Rimas (Rhymes, 1902) and Arias tristes (Sad Airs, 1903) to a delicate, sensitive, and sentimental tone that drew much from Spanish romanticism. After 1916 he entered a new phase, for which he is justly well known. Stripping anecdote and obvious sentiment from his lines, he made heavy use...