SOURCE: Fontanella, Lee. “Parnassian Precept and a New Way of Seeing Casal's Museo ideal.” Comparative Literature Studies 7, no. 4 (December 1970): 450-79.

In the following essay, Fontanella discusses the form and function of Casal's poetry series “Mi museo ideal,” which can be interpreted as an ode to French painter Gustave Moreau. The middle ten sonnets each focus on a separate painting of Moreau, while the first and last pieces act as framing elements that situate the collection as a type of museum or “temple for art.”

Very few of those critics who have paid due attention to the Cuban poet Julián del Casal (1863-1893) have elaborated on their observations of the media in and from which the poet worked in creating “Mi museo ideal.”¹ The question is significant, for the French poets of the later nineteenth century, especially the Parnassians whom Casal so admired, determined in great part his...