Parnasse, Le. The Parnassian ideal was the dominant trend in French poetry during the Second Empire and early years of the Third Republic. Recognizing Leconte de Lisle as their leader, a group of young poets, united in their ambition to free poetry from what they saw as outdated Romantic theories of inspiration in favour of a more disciplined, scientific approach to the content and forms of poetry, formed around Catulle Mendès, initially in his short-lived Revue fantaisiste (1861) and subsequently in the three volumes of verse, Le Parnasse contemporain (1866, 1871, 1876). Considered for much of this century as a parenthesis between the major movements of Romanticism and Symbolism, it is now increasingly recognized as having played a pivotal role in the interaction between the two.
In theoretical terms at least, the Parnassians defended impersonality, impassivity, and formal perfection against Romanticism's lyrical expression of the self and commitment to the social value of art, as a result, on one level, of the failure of the 1848 Revolution and, on another, of their commitment to the scientific objectivity central to the Second Empire's positivist ideology [see Comte]. Though they dismissed Lamartine's ‘poésie du cœur’, Hugo's descriptive poetry (Les Orientales, 1829) and the cosmic visions of Les Contemplations (1856) and La Légende des siècles (1859) were major influences. In his poems on the history of humanity in the Poèmes antiques and Poèmes barbares, Leconte de Lisle created a personal vision of nature and human history, whose force derives largely from its engagement with Parnassian prosodic constraints. Gautier's theory of ‘l'art pour l'art’ became an increasingly powerful rallying-point, and his Émaux et camées (1852) extended the prosodic implications of the analogies with painting and sculpture which had already exercised the Romantic generation of the 1830s. His 1857 poem ‘L'Art’ became a Parnassian manifesto, and Banville's Petit traité de poésie française (1872) codified this emphasis on the plastic qualities of verse and the essential structuring role of rhyme. Parnassian poetry failed when, in order to express its scientific or philosophical ambitions, it lapsed into precisely the ‘didactisme rimé’ to which it was in theory opposed, but its emphasis on poetry as an organized system of rhymes, stanzaic structures, and descriptive, picturesque effects defined the basis from which Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé, and Rimbaud would, in their different ways, ‘creuser le vers’. In 1893 the success among the Symbolists of Heredia's Les Trophées, in many respects an anthology of Parnassian themes and practices, testifies to their recognition of the importance of the Parnassian phase in 19th-c. French poetry.
[James Kearns]
