Maria Judyta Woźniak, “Entre tradición y modernidad: modificaciones del poema litánico en la poesía de Juan Ramón Jiménez,” Neophilologus C (2016), 3: 1-12.
Litanic verse, older than the literatures of Europe, has become an important and coherent versification structure. However, in Spanish-language literature the poetic litany of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was not very productive: various types of repetitiveness are common devices in the literature but they are seldom of a litanic nature. Nevertheless, from the beginning of Modernism it was a creative inspiration to many poets. The main objective of this article is to present various interpretive options that litanic poetics brings in poems by Juan Ramón Jiménez based on an analysis of stylistic devices. The Spanish poet transforms the centuries-old tradition of poetic litany as a genre deeply rooted in the Christian tradition. It serves as a way to express subjective and sensual meanings: if God (or a god) is its addressee, he does not correspond to Christian images; to express the disintegration of one’s own identity; to attribute divine features to the human and poetic art; or to express the uniqueness of a moment, place, feeling. It is only when the continuity in the litany genre development is noticed it is possible to see modifications of the meaning and function of the litanic genre, departure from a prayer-like nature, the closest one to the genre pattern, for the sake of expressing what is human and individual.