SOURCE: Glickman, Robert Jay. “Julián Del Casal: Letters to Gustave Moreau.” Revista Hispanica Moderna 37, nos. 1-2, (1972-73): 101-35.

In the following essay, Glickman assesses the significance of Casal's correspondence with painter Gustave Moreau, noting that the letters served to battle the loneliness and despair of Casal's everyday life.

Julián del Casal was one of the most sensitive and emotionally vulnerable of the Spanish American Modernists. Disagreeing with the values of contemporary society, opposing authority-figures whom he considered unjust, and moving farther and farther away from the Church despite his desperate need for religious faith, Casal constantly tried to discover ways of protecting himself from the pain that life inflicted on him. He sought escape from daily miseries through dream and through art. He replaced nature with an artificial world of his own making; he cultivated the exotic; he investigated the macabre. And possessed of a boundless...