PARNASSIANS, a name given to a group of French poets writing between 1866 and 1876 led by two poets in their early twenties, Catulle Mendes and Xavier de Ricart, who with the help of the young publisher, Lemerre, launched the Parnasse Contemporain on March 2, 1866. The title was a challenge to the old romantics of the generation of Hugo and Lamartine, and an appeal to the Latin and Hellenic tradition represented by J. du Bellay, Andre Chenier and the living tetrarchat, Leconte de Lisle, Banville, Gautier and Baudelaire, whom the young men took as their patrons. The first series ran to 18 weekly numbers and in cluded poems by 37 writers, the majority unknown or little known to the public. Among them were poets so diverse in temperament as Coppee, Sully Prudhomme, Mallarme and Verlaine. A second series, projected in 1869 but interrupted by the war, appeared in 1871; the third and last in 1876. Impassibility was the move ment's catch-word; its object was in general the plastic presenta tion of themes admitting romantic freedom and colour but ex cluding romantic sensibility and Byronic egoism ; its method, a refined choice and manipulation of phrase, rhythm and stanza.
The spirit of Parnassianism, or the formula "Art for art's sake" and the mot juste, had its vogue outside France in the later years of the 19th century, notably in Spain where it found a fine poet in Ruben Dario, and in England where it fitted into the reaction against the ethical preoccupations of the Victorian classics, and produced in J. E. Flecker a belated but highly gifted representative of its central intention, the cultivation of a style at once clear-cut and suggestive. In France the classicizing impulse survived the de parture of the symbolists and decadents and is a controlling force in poetry still.
See Catulle Mendes, Rapport au Ministere d'instruction publique sur le developpement de la poisie francaise, (1902), and Le Mouvement poetique Francais de 1867-1900 (1903).