Parnassianism

Parnassianism was a French poetry movement of the mid-to-late nineteenth century, named for the anthology Le Parnasse contemporain (1866), that reacted against what its poets saw as the excessive emotional self-indulgence of Romanticism, favoring instead formal precision, restrained impersonality and an almost sculptural attention to technical craft, sound and visual detail. Led by Charles Marie Rene Leconte de Lisle as its central figure and elder statesman, with Theophile Gautier's doctrine of art for art's sake as a key precursor influence, the movement's poets, including Jose-Maria de Heredia and, in his early career, Paul Verlaine, favored exotic, historical and classical subjects treated with cool detachment rather than direct personal feeling. Parnassianism's emphasis on formal perfection and its rejection of Romantic subjectivity directly prepared the ground for the Symbolist movement that followed and reacted against it in turn, and its influence extended well beyond France into Spanish-American Modernismo and other language traditions that absorbed its cult of formal craftsmanship.