CASAL, Julian del, Cuban poet: b.
1863; d. 1893. He was a half morbid striver after the super-aesthetic and a pronounced lover of the luxury and elegance of the Orient and of Paris. Endowed with a fervid imagination and a strongly poetic touch he found followers not only in Cuba, but throughout Latin America, and later in Spain itself. 'None of the countries 'that he loved and whose manners and customs and modes of thought he imitated, had he ever visited. Highly colored were his mental pictures of them, by wonderful visions from the land of imagination and of dreams in which he lived. Yet, with all his love of beauty, luxury and elegance, he was very much a pessimist and his discontent with life finds constant expression in his •writings. He handled the sonnet with a master-hand and made it do duty in picturing the many phases of life into which his active imagination constantly led him. His work
covers a wide variety of subjects, ranging from clear-cut pictures of heroic characters of classi cal Greece, to sketches of native life in Havana, in prose and poetry, and side-stepping at times into politics, society and biography. Casal was an intimate friend of Ruben Dario, the Nicara guan poet and leader of poetic thought through out Latin America from 1895 to 1915; and the latter borrowed a number of his reactory ideas from the young Cuban poet, whose writ ings in La Habana Elegante.and other periodi cals had early made him the leading figure of his day in Cuban literature. Among Casal's published work are al Viento) (1890) ; (1891) ; y Rimas) (prose, 1893). In a study of Jaris Karl Huysmans, he displays his critical ability and his love of the exotic and sensuous. Consult Meza, Ramon, del Casel' (Havana 1910).