PARNASSIANISM. – Literary movement of the second half of the nineteenth century. The poets who, to a greater or lesser extent, deserve the name of Parnassians began to group together around 1860.
The first attempt to document their activity was made by Catulle Mendès in 1861, with the journal Revue fantaisiste, which lasted only nine months. Poems by Gautier, Banville, Baudelaire, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and Mendès himself, then still very young, appeared in II. Subsequently, Lecomte de Lisle supported the movement with numerous critical articles, which clarified its still obscure aims. In 1865, L’Art, directed by Xavier de Ricard, defined the group’s poetics as the need for the new poems to have impeccable craftsmanship, in opposition to the “epileptic” convulsions of Romanticism, in the name of a firmer and more serene inspiration. In place of L’Art, which was ceasing publication, the publisher Lemerre collected in 1866, in a first volume entitled Le Parnasse contemporain, the finest of the lyrical production of this tendency. Alongside the masters already named, the young poets grouped together: Louis Ménard, Hérédia, Coppée, Mendès, L. Diers, Sully Prudhomme, Verlaine, and Mallarmé. The first series of the Parnasse, which was well received, was followed in 1871 by a new volume, in which there still appeared some young beginners, such as France, Mérat, Plessis, Ch. Cros, and others not always faithful to the “Parnassian” spirit. The latter gradually became more theoretical, like a body of established precepts: purity of form, the impassivity of the poet’s soul, to whose creative travail art must be associated in a living but neither tumultuous nor disintegrating manner, and finally the cult of the word, which would ultimately be divinized in Mallarmé.