Few have courted perfection like Nobel Prize winner Juan Ramon Jimenez, who felt both fear and exhilaration before his own high standards and negotiated shrewdly with his own personal best. Drawing upon Juan Ramon'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 Ramon's relentless quest for the perfect poem leads here to an inspiring new vision of how to reach perfection in any endeavor.

Juan Ramon 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.