Parnassians

Parnassians, a group of French poets who set a new standard of formal precision in lyric poetry from the 1860s to the 1890s, partly in reaction against the emotional extravagance of Romanticism. Adopting Leconte de Lisle as their leader, they followed Théophile Gautier's principle of art for art's sake, sometimes championing the virtues of impersonality and of traditional verse‐forms. Their work appeared in the anthology La Parnasse contemporain (1866), which was followed by two further collections with the same title in 1871 and 1876. The leading figures in the group included José‐Maria de Hérédia—whose sonnets in Les Trophées (1893) constitute the foremost achievement of Parnassianism—along with R.‐F.‐A. Sully‐Prudhomme, Catulle Mendès, Léon Dierx, and François Coppée. Their name refers to Mount Parnassus, a site associated with the Greek muses.