PARNASSIANISM. - A literary movement of the second half of the 19th century. The poets, who more or less deserved the name of Parnassians, began to group together around 1860.
The first attempt to document the activity was made by Catulle Mendès in 1861 with the short-lived review *Revue fantaisiste*, which lasted only nine months. It featured poems by Gautier, Banville, Baudelaire, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, and by Mendès himself, who was then very young. Subsequently, Leconte de Lisle supported the movement with numerous critical articles that clarified its still vague aims. In 1865, *L’Art*, directed by Xavier de Ricard, defined the poetics of the group in terms of the need for new poems to be flawlessly crafted, in opposition to the “epileptic” convulsions of Romanticism, in the name of a steadier and calmer inspiration. When *L’Art* ceased publication, the publisher Lemerre in 1866 gathered the best of the lyrical output of this tendency into a first volume titled *Le Parnasse contemporain*. Alongside the already mentioned masters, younger poets gathered: Louis Ménard, Heredia, Coppée, Mendès, L. Dierx, Sully Prudhomme, Verlaine, and Mallarmé. The first series of *Le Parnasse*, which met with success, was followed in 1871 by a new volume, which included young beginners such as France, Mérat, Plessis, Ch. Cros, and others not always faithful to the “Parnassian” spirit. This latter gradually became more theoretical, as a body of established precepts: purity of form, impassivity of the poet’s soul, to whose creative travail art must be vitally but not tumultuously or disruptively joined, and finally the cult of the word, which would later be divinized in Mallarmé.