Parnassianism

Parnassianism was a post-romantic French literary movement of the second half of the 19th century that It emerged around 1850 and solidified between 1866 and 1876 as a reaction against the Romanticism of Victor Hugo, subjectivism and literary Realism. The founders of this movement were Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) and Leconte de Lisle (1818-1894).

History

The word is of Greek origin and refers to the top of Mount Parnassus where the Muses lived, minor goddesses, companions of Apollo and inspirers of the arts.

This aesthetic was prepared and announced by Émaux et Camées ("Enamels and Cameos", 1852) by Théophile Gautier and the Poèmes antiques (& #34;Ancient Poems", 1852) by Leconte de Lisle, and the following publications:

• La Revue Fantaisiste (1861), founded and directed by Catulle Mendès.

• La Revue du Progrès (1863), which defined a scientific poetry and progressive ideology, founded by Louis-Xavier de Ricard, and in which Paul Verlaine published his first poem.
• L'Art (1865), a magazine that inspires Leconte de Lisle and which is also founded by Louis-Xavier de Ricard.
• The Renaissance littérarie et artistique (1872-1874), a magazine founded by Émile Blémont.
• The Petit traité de versification française (1872), Théodore de Banville.
• The Polythéisme Hellénique (1863), Louis Ménard.
• The Rêveries d'un Païen mystique (1876), Louis Ménard.
• La Légende du Parnasse Contemporain (1884), by Catulle Mèndes.

It was established as such in the only three installments of the poetic magazine-anthology titled Le Parnasse Contemporain (1866-1876). They included poems by Théophile Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, José María de Heredia, Théodore de Banville, Sully Prudhomme, Catulle Mendès and Albert Mérat, to which were added the names of other poets whose subsequent evolution would be classified as symbolist, among them Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine or Stéphane Mallarmé.

The three installments, published by the editor Alphonse Lemerre (who would also publish separately a good part of the collections of poems by the Parnassian authors), cover the following years:

1. Le Parnasse contemporain, I (1866)
2. Le Parnasse contemporain, II (1869-71)
3. Le Parnasse contemporain, III (1876)

This group was united by the appreciation of poetic art in itself, impersonality and the rejection of social or political commitment. Art did not have to be useful or virtuous and its purpose was only to create beauty in the artistic work, which was autonomous from the conscience and personality of its author. The formula "L'art pour l'art" ('art for art', seen as form and not content, dissociated from social, political and even individual commitments) by Théophile Gautier, considered a precursor, was adopted as the movement's emblem. This aesthetic rehabilitates the careful and meticulous work of the artist who often uses the metaphor of sculpture to symbolize the resistance of the "poetic matter" and compares literature to the plastic arts.

Parnassianism is a post-romantic movement because it emerges as an antithesis of Romanticism, but it also distances itself from literary Realism due to its dreamy and imaginative character, allergic to bourgeois vulgarity and apothecary. The opposition to Romanticism is caused by what the Parnassians considered its "excesses"; excess of subjectivism, hypertrophy of the ego—excessive and abnormal growth—, excess of feeling. Hence, the Parnassians advocated a depersonalized poetry, far from one's own feelings and with themes that had to do with art, themes that were in themselves suggestive, beautiful, exotic, with a marked preference for classical antiquity, especially Greek, and through the Far East.

In terms of style, the Parnassians took great care of form. Continent and content had to go in agreement. In this way, if the Romantics demonstrated a concern for feelings, the Parnassians did so for beauty. However, whether due to an aesthetic defect or a certain exaggeration in the management of his expressive resources, some of his works are too pedantic for current tastes, which explains why many of the authors of this current are currently known only to specialists. scholars of the subject.

Gérard de Nerval, a year before hanging himself in a Parisian alley, published The Chimeras (Les quimères, 1854), an astonishing collection of sonnets of a cryptic and pure. Very shortly before, his friend Théophile Gautier, disillusioned with Romanticism after having fought in the bloodless battle of Hernani (1830), in his Émaux et Camées ("Enamels and cameos", 1852), places poetry beyond romantic subjectivism, dreaming of models of formal perfection that ensure immortality. Leconte de Lisle, lawyer and Hellenist imbued with the social humanitarianism of Charles Fourier and who took a very active part in the Revolution of 1848, after the coup d'état of Louis Napoleon renounced politics and took refuge in poetry. His Ancient Poems (Poèmes antiques, 1852) began the current that would later be called "the Parnassus", which unites the themes of Greco-Roman antiquity and ideals of the most careful formal perfection, symbols of freedom, progress and republic.

Features

• Reaction against poetic subjectivism: search for impersonality, distance, objectivity, impassibility: rejection of the poetic "me," pronoun that is often avoided in their verses.
• Contempt for poetic emotion and lyricism.
• Descriptivism, cultivation of descriptive or "pintoresque" poetry: ut pictura poesis. The sharp and plastic image is sought.
• Special requirement of formal perfection, pursuit of beauty as absolute ideal: the metric is so rigorous that there is a total absence of poetic licenses. It is an absolutely controlled art, and therefore prefers classical metric groups such as sonnet.
• Autonomy of the artistic work of all emotion and subjectivity of the author: the "art for art".
• The formal perfection ensures the immortality of the artistic work: poetry must be transformed into a jewel of which the artist is the goldsmith.
• Consideration of the word as an aesthetic "matter" related to that of plastic arts, to which it seeks to appear in its patient and continuous work in search of perfection: "Sculpte, lime, cisèle", ("sculpe, lime, cincela") writes in L’Art Théophile Gautier.
• Lack of social or political commitment: Parisians are not interested in another element than beauty. Art should not be useful, moral or educational: it should only create and accumulate beauty.
• In the theme, recreation of prints of history, Greek-Latin myths or refined or exotic environments, and aversion to representing contemporary reality.
• His philosophy is pessimistic: it reflects the fall of old dreams, ideals and cultures (Greek, Hindu, Egyptian). It reflects the sad desperation of the modern soul and a call to liberating death.
• Imaginative evolution of reality in time and space through myth, dream and legend.
• Opposite to romanticism, he destinies to be temporarily located in the Middle Ages.
• Anticlericalist posture, when not of direct rejection of Christianity, among most of the Parnasians.

Transcendence

French Parnassianism had a decisive influence on the emergence of the French Symbolism of the Cursed Poets and on the Latin American literary movement of modernism, its main exponent being the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío.

In Brazil, a disciple of Alberto de Oliveira, Olavo Bilac, was greatly influenced by Parnassianism. There was also strong Polish Parnassianism with figures such as Antoni Lange, Felicjan Faleński, Cyprian Kamil Norwid and Leopold Staff. And the most important Romanian poet experienced the Parnassian imprint: Alexandru Macedonski. In England, Gerard Manley Hopkins used the term "Parnassian" disparagingly to describe competent but uninspired poetry and identified this particular tendency in the work of Lord Alfred Tennyson, and more specifically in his poem i>Enoch Arden.

List of Parnassian poets

The precursors

• Théodore de Banville
• Théophile Gautier

The most famous Parnassians

• Leconte de Lisle (master of movement rows)
• Catulle Mendès
• Albert Glatigny
• Sully Prudhomme
• José María de Heredia
• François Coppée
• Léon Dierx
• Louis Ménard
• Armand Silvestre

The great symbolists who began as Parnassians

• Charles Baudelaire
• Paul Verlaine
• Stéphane Mallarmé
• Auguste Villiers De L'Isle-Adam

Minor Parnassians and other figures attached to the movement for some time

• Louis-Xavier de Ricard
• Emmanuel des Essarts
• Ernest D'Hervilly
• André Lemoyne
• Léon Valade
• Albert Mérat
• Anatole France
• Léon Cladel
• Jean Aicard
• Joseph Autran
• Auguste Barbier
• Émile Bergerat
• André Theuriet
• Émile Blémont
• Robert de Bonnières
• Paul Bourget
• Auguste Lacaussade
• Louise Collet
• Philoxène Boyer
• Henri Cazalis (who wrote under the pseudonym of Jean Lahor)
• Charles Cros
• Nina de Callias
• Émile Deschamps
• Antoni Deschamps
• Jules Forni
• Léon Grandet
• Arsène Houssaye
• Gabriel Vicaire
• Auguste Vacquerie
• Henry Winter
• Armand Renaud
• Eugène Lefébure
• Edmond Lepelletier
• Auguste De Chatillon
• Jules Forni
• Charles Coran
• Eugène Villemin
• Robert Luzarche
• Alexandre Piedagnel
• Francis Tesson
• Gabriel Marc
• Alexis Martin
• Georges Lafenestre
• Gustave Pradelle
• Alexandre Cosnard
• Louis Salles
• Frédéric Plessis
• Charles Robinot-Bertrand
• Eugène Manuel
• Claudius Popelin
• Amédée Pigeon
• Louisa Siefert
• Joséphin Soulary