Casal, Julián del

Casal, Julián del

(ho͞olyän` dĕl käsäl`), 1863–93, Cuban poet, b. Havana. A friend of Rubén Darío, Casal became a leader in modernismomodernismo
, movement in Spanish literature that had its beginning in Latin America. It was paramount in the last decade of the 19th cent. and the first decade of the 20th cent.

Modernismo derived from French symbolism and the Parnassian school.
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. He was greatly influenced by the French ParnassiansParnassians
, group of 19th-century French poets, so called from their journal the Parnasse contemporain. Issued from 1866 to 1876, it included poems of Leconte de Lisle, Banville, Sully-Prudhomme, Verlaine, Coppée, and J. M. de Heredia.
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. Afflicted with a painful form of tuberculosis, he wrote verse expressing deep pessimism, often choosing subjects from antiquity and far-off lands, especially Japan. His best-known collections are Hojas al viento [leaves in the wind] (1890) and Bustos y rimas [busts and rhymes] (1893).

Bibliography

See critical edition of his poems in English (3 vol., 1976–78); selected prose in English (1949); study by P. Pearsall (1984).

Casal, Julián Del

 

Born Nov. 7, 1863, in Havana; died there Oct. 21, 1893. Cuban poet. Son of a landowner; an official.

The influence of Spanish romanticism noticeable in Casal’s early poetry had already given way to the influence of the French Parnassians by the time of his first book, Leaves in the Wind (1890); this influence in turn gave way to that of the French symbolists, as shown in the collection Snow (1892). Busts and Rhymes (1893) included both poetry and prose. Casal’s poetry is characterized by pessimism and an escape from reality into an exotic world but at the same time by harmoniousness of form and musicality of verse.

WORKS

Poesías completas. Havana, 1945.
In Russian translation:
In the collection Kubinskaia poeziia. Moscow, 1959.
In the collection Soldaty svobody. Moscow, 1963.

REFERENCES

Portuondo, J. A. Istoricheskii ocherk kubinskoi literatury. Moscow,
1961. (Translated from Spanish.) Monner Sans, J. M. J. del Casal y el modernismo hispano-americano.
Mexico City, 1952.