The Complete Perfectionist A Poetics of Work

Perfection is an ideal that makes life worth living--the internal applause as you hit the perfect note, write the perfect piece, reach the goal you once thought unattainable.  Yet many of us abandon that pursuit and settle for less than what we secretly want: perfect work, perfect love, perfect selves.  

Few have courted perfection like Nobel Prize winner Juan Ram¾n JimÚnez, who felt both fear and exhilaration before his own high standards and negotiated shrewdly with his own personal best.  

Drawing upon Juan Ram¾n's aphorisms, Christopher Maurer meditates upon his struggle and gives us a guide to the pursuit of life's ultimate pleasure: the dream of doing perfect work.  Juan Ram¾n's relentless quest for the perfect poem leads here to an inspiring new vision of how to reach perfection in any endeavor.

Juan Ram¾n analyzes the most radical elements of perfection: how to create and revise, reconcile noise and silence, listen to dream and instinct, learn from nature, seize the moment, and calm the fear of death.  

The Complete Perfectionist provides advice and encouragement for anyone for whom mere excellence is not enough.

Juan Ram¾n JimÚnez (1881-1958), one of the greatest Spanish poets of the twentieth century, wrote innumerable books of lyrical verse, fine prose poems, aphorisms, and critical essays.  Juan Ram¾n lived in Madrid until the Spanish Civil War, and died in exile in Puerto Rico, after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Christopher Maurer has written widely on Spanish literature, from Baltasar Gracißn (author of the New York Times bestsellers The Art of Worldly Wisdom and A Pocket Mirror for Heroes) to Federico GarcÝa Lorca.  He is chairman of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Vanderbilt University.