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He was not interested in classical imaginations and impersonal descriptions; he was concerned almost entirely with the modern life of Paris and the actual experiences of a disillusioned soul. As intensely personal as the Parnassiens were detached, he poured into his verse all the gloom of his own character, all the bitterness of his own philosophy, all the agony of his own despair.
In poetry, the reaction against Romanticism had begun with the Émaux et Camées of THÉOPHILE GAUTIER himself in his youth one of the leaders of the Romantic School; and it was carried further in the work of a group of writers known as the Parnassiens the most important of whom were LECONTE DE LISLE, SULLY PRUDHOMME, and HEREDIA. Their poetry bears the same relation to that of Musset as the history of Renan bears to that of Michelet, and the prose of Flaubert to that of Hugo.
Two other collections followed, one in 1869 and one in 1876, by numerous contributors, who have mostly published separate works. They are called collectively, half seriously and half in derision, "Les Parnassiens." Their cardinal principle is a devotion to poetry as an art, with diversity of aim and subject.
If as a poet we contemplate him, Coppee belongs to the group commonly called "Parnassiens" not the Romantic School, the sentimental lyric effusion of Lamartine, Hugo, or De Musset! When the poetical lute was laid aside by the triad of 1830, it was taken up by men of quite different stamp, of even opposed tendencies.
This was followed by two volumes of poetry: 'Les Poemes Dores' , and 'Les Noces Corinthiennes' . With the last mentioned book his reputation became established. Anatole France belongs to the class of poets known as "Les Parnassiens."
This was BAUDELAIRE, whose small volume Les Fleurs du Mal gives him a unique place among the masters of the poetic art. In his form, indeed, he is closely related to his contemporaries. His writing has all the care, the balance, the conscientious polish of the Parnassiens; it is in his matter that he differs from them completely.
French Literature from the Age of the Restoration to the Present Time. History: Thierry, Sismondi, Thiers, Mignet, Martin, Michelet, and others. Poetry and the Drama; Rise of the Romantic School: Beranger, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and others; Les Parnassiens. Fiction: Hugo, Gautier, Dumas, Merimee, Balzac, Sand, Sandeau and others. Criticism: Sainte-Beuve, Taine, and others. Miscellaneous.
He was fond of explaining that Montparnasse had been a hill where the students of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries came to amuse themselves. In 1761 the slope was levelled and the boulevard laid out, but the name was predestined, he would declare, for the habitation of the ‘Parnassiens.’
In literature this altogether foreign mode of creative activity has found its most complete expression among the Parnassiens and their congeners, whose creed is summed up in the formula, faultless form and impassiveness.
If, as I believe, emotional thought rather than imagery is the essence of poetry, then the modern school of imagists and their French forbears among the "Parnassiens" are mistaken. Their effort comes in the end to a revival of the old thesis ut pictura poesis, the attempt to make poetry a vision of nature rather than an expression of the inner life.
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