PARNASSIANISM. - A literary movement of the second half of the nineteenth century. The poets who more or less 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. In it appeared poems by Gautier, Banville, Baudelaire, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and by Mendès himself, then very young. 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 poetics of the group in terms of the necessity, for the new poems, of an impeccable workmanship, in opposition to the "epileptic" convulsions of Romanticism, in the name of a firmer and more serene inspiration. In place of L'Art, which ceased publication, the publisher Lemerre in 1866 gathered into a first volume, entitled Le Parnasse contemporain, the best of the lyric production of that 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, received with success, was followed in 1871 by a new volume, in which still appear 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, impassibility of the poet's soul, with whose creative travail art must associate itself in a living but not tumultuous and disintegrating manner, and finally a cult of the word, which would end in Mallarmé by being divinized.
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Giacinto Spagnoletti