COSTA Y LLOBERA, MIGUEL. — Priest and one of the most representative contemporary Catalan poets, born in Pollensa (Balearic Islands) on 10 March 1854, died in Palma on 16 October 1922.
His first Poesies (Palma 1885) belong to an environment that was still Romantic; they include Lo pi de Formentor, the symbol of his ascetic and poetic elevation, translated into almost all the European languages, while with Oda a Horaci (1879) C. ranks among the first Spanish Carduccians. Having interrupted his legal studies in his homeland, he studied theology at the Gregorian University and was ordained a priest in Rome in 1888, where he lived for five years (1885–90), inspired by a profound sense of Romanitas and Christianity that seals his most significant works. His most inspired Spanish poems belong to the Roman period (Rouas, En las catacumbas de Roma, Adiós a Italia), later collected in a volume (Líricas, Palma 1899). But in modern Catalan literature they have earned him a place no less distinguished than that of Verdaguer: La deixa del geni grec (Barcelona 1900), Poesies (1907), Visions de la Palestina (1908), and above all Horacianes (1906), poems composed with Carduccian technique, yet permeated by a lofty spirituality and profoundly human.
During the last decade of his life he wrote almost exclusively the poetic version of the Himnes de Prudenci, devoting himself instead to the spiritual ministries proper to his canonry and to the inner life, deep and edifying in a man who had attained such literary glory.