PARNASSIAN

French Parnassien, member of a group of 19th-century French poets headed by Leconte de Lisle, who stressed restraint, objectivity, technical perfection, and precise description as a reaction against the emotionalism and verbal imprecision of the Romantics. The poetic movement led by the Parnassians that resulted in experimentation with metres and verse forms and the revival of the sonnet paralleled the trend toward Realism in drama and the novel that became evident in the late 19th century. Initially taking their themes from contemporary society, the Parnassians later turned to the mythology, epics, and sagas of exotic lands and past civilizations, notably India and ancient Greece, for inspiration. The Parnassians derived their name from the anthology to which they contributed: Le Parnasse Contemporain (3 vol., 1866, 1871, 1876), edited by Louis-Xavier de Ricard and Catulle Mends and published by Alphonse Lemerre. Their principles, though, had been formulated earlier in Thophile Gautier's preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), which expounded the theory of art for art's sake, in Leconte de Lisle's preface to his Pomes antiques (1852), and in La Revue Fantaisiste (1860), founded by Mends. Gautier's maux et cames (1852), a collection of carefully worked, formally perfect poems, pointed to a new conception of poetry and influenced the works of major Parnassians such as Albert Glatigny, Thodore de Banville, Franois Coppe, Lon Dierx, and Jos Maria de Heredia. Heredia, the most representative of the group, looked for precise details, double rhymes, sonorous words, and exotic names, and concentrated on making the 14th line of his sonnets the most striking. The influence of the Parnassians was felt throughout Europe and was particularly evident in the Modernist movement of Spain and Portugal and in the Jeune Belgique (Young Belgium) movement. In the late 19th century a new generation of poets, the Symbolists, followers of Stphane Mallarm and Paul Verlaine, themselves Parnassians in their youth, broke away from precise description in search of an art of nuance and musical suggestion.