JOSE MARIA

HEREDIA Y CAMPUZANO (1803-1839)  , Cuban poet, was born at Santiago de Cuba on the 31st of December 1803, studied at the university of Havana, and was called to the bar in 1823 . In the autumn of 1823 he was arrested on a charge of conspiracy against the Spanish government, and was sentenced to banishment for life . He took refuge in the United States, published a volume of verses at New York in 1825, and then went to Mexico, where, becoming naturalized, he obtained a post as magistrate . In 1832 a collection of his poems was issued at Toluca, and in 1836 he obtained permission to visit Cuba for two months . Disappointed in his political ambitions, and broken in health, Heredia returned to Mexico in January 1837, and died at Toluca on the 21st of May 1839 . Many of his earlier pieces are merely clever translations from French, English and Italian; but his originality is placed beyond doubt by such poems as the Himno del deslerrado, the epistle to Emilia, Desenganos, and the celebrated ode to Niagara . Bello may be thought to excel Heredia in execution, and a few lines of Olmedo's Canto d Junin vibrate with a virile passion to which the Cuban poet rarely attained; but the sincerity of his patriotism and the sublimity of his imagination have secured for Heredia a real supremacy among Spanish-American poets . The best edition of his works is that published at Paris in 1893 with a preface by Elias Zerolo .