Parnassians

Parnassians , group of 19th-century French poets, so called from their journal the Parnasse contemporain. Issued from 1866 to 1876, it included poems of Leconte de Lisle, Banville, Sully-Prudhomme, Verlaine, Coppée, and J. M. de Heredia. The Parnassians were influenced by Théophile Gautier and his doctrine of art for art's sake. In reaction to the looser forms of romantic poetry, they strove for exact and faultless workmanship, selecting exotic and classical subjects which they treated with rigidity of form and emotional detachment.

Parnassians, a group of French poets, headed by Leconte de Lisle, who sought restraint, precision, and objectivity in poetry, in reaction to the emotional extravagances of Romanticism. Their name derives from the three collections of their work published under the title Le Parnasse contemporain, in 1866, 1871, and 1876.

Parnassian of or belonging to Parnassus, poetic XVII; epithet of school of French poetry (les Parnassiens) XIX. f. L. Parnassus — Gr. Parnassós Parnassus, mountain anciently sacred to the Muses. See -IAN.