[2] He was educated in the Jesuit institution of San Luis Gonzaga, in El Puerto de Santa María, near Cadiz.

The death of his father the same year devastated him, and a resulting depression led to his being sent first to France, where he had an affair with his doctor's wife, and then to a sanatorium in Madrid staffed by novice nuns, where he lived from 1901 to 1903.

The plan was only aborted by a telegram they arranged via the Spanish consul to the poet, giving him the fabricated news of Georgina's death.

[citation needed] The main subjects of many of his other poems were music and color, which, at times, he compared to love or lust.

[citation needed] Upon the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he and Zenobia went into exile in Puerto Rico, where he settled in 1946.

His literary influence on Puerto Rican writers strongly marks the works of Giannina Braschi, René Marqués, Aurora de Albornoz, and Manuel Ramos Otero.

[citation needed] In addition, he was a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Maryland, which renamed Jimenez Hall for him in 1981.

[citation needed] He also collaborated with his wife in the translation of the Irish playwright John Millington Synge's Riders to the Sea (1920).