Chapter One

The Dominance of Parnassian Poetry

Before considering the situation of Parnassian poetry – and perhaps its underestimated dominance – it is useful to recall the basic origins and themes for which le Parnasse came to be known. As the words Parnasse and Parnassus suggest, the poetry grouped into the three volumes of Le Parnasse contemporain: recueil de vers nouveaux inhabited Mount Parnassus, mythological home of the Muses and, more generally, of poetry. With this return to mythology came a neoclassical turn away from their own era: roughly 1860 to 1880. They similarly rejected the social utility of poetry that had come to characterize the 1830s and that had perhaps seen its symbolic apotheosis in 1848, when Romantic sensation Alphonse de Lamartine ascended to the head of the provisional government:

The overwhelming majority of writers in the 1830s and 1840s either endorsed and campaigned tirelessly in behalf of the various ideological aspirations of what became known as social Romanticism or quietly consented to the practice of popular literature for the sake of swift personal recognition and financial gain.21

In the preface to his 1835 Mademoiselle de Maupin, Théophile Gautier refuted poetry’s potential for social utility. Five years earlier, on 25 February 1830, Gautier had famously worn a red vest in support of his fellow Romantics and their ideals at the première of Victor Hugo’s play Hernani, thus casting himself as a major player in the “bataille d’Hernani” [battle of Hernani]. Hugo’s preface to Hernani broke French theater’s reliance on tenets from the classical age; Gautier’s preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin marked a similar

21 Robert F. Denommé, The French Parnassian Poets (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972), 3. 18 Leaving Parnassus departure from an earlier model, and his anti-utility stance has been paraphrased as l’art pour l’art ever since. Of course, the relative proximity (just five years) of these two im- portant events, and Gautier’s involvement in each, shows the extent to which Romanticism and le Parnasse are closely aligned on some levels and yet significantly opposed on others. Indeed, “[…] opinions to this day are divided between a view of le Parnasse as a continua- tion of Romanticism and as a reaction against it.”22 This complexity comes precisely from le Parnasse’s rich diversity and its lack of cohesion.23 Never a clearly-defined literary movement or school as were Romanticism and, later, Symbolism (with its official manifesto), the Parnassian phenomenon was more a assemblage of poets whose work shared, to varying degrees, some common approaches to poetic content or form.24 In his landmark 1903 history of French poetry of the last third of the nineteenth century, former Parnassian Catulle Mendès reflected on the lack of cohesion in this way:

Il n’y eut jamais, je le répète, ni dans l’intention, ni dans le fait, d’école parnas- sienne; nous n’avions rien de commun, sinon la jeunesse de l’espoir, la haine du débraillé poétique et la chimère de la beauté parfaite. Et cette beauté, chacun de nous la conçut selon son personnel idéal. Je ne pense pas qu’à aucune époque d’aucune littérature, des poètes du même moment aient été à la fois plus unis de cœur et plus différents par l’idée et par l’expression […] Au contraire, il se pro- duisit entre ceux qu’on appelle encore parnassiens […] une extraordinaire

22 Gretchen Schultz, The Gendered Lyric: Subjectivity and Difference in Nineteenth- Century French Poetry. Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures 17 (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1999), 84. For more on the numerous critical points of view, see Schultz, Gendered Lyric 287n2. Critics such as Schultz and Metzidakis have revisited this question, with the former concluding that le Parnasse is “[. . .] a rejection of Romanticism's perceived femininity and an attempt to reclaim poetry as a masculine domain” (Gendered Lyric 84). See Schultz’s “Part 2: Parnassian Impassiv- ity and Frozen Femininity,” 81-167 in Gendered Lyric. 23 In his exhaustive study of this generation of poets, Luc Badesco details the origins of this nebulous assemblage, tracing the “quatre groupes distincts” [four distinct groups] that, together, made up much of the Parnassian group. See Luc Badesco, La génération poétique de 1860. La jeunesse des deux rives, 2 vols (Paris: Éditions A.-G. Nizet, 1971), 1:320. Other useful studies on the composition of the Parnassian group are Catulle Mendès, La légende du Parnasse contemporain (Brussels: August E. Brancart, 1884) and Robert F. Denommé, The French Parnassian Poets. 24 “The one hundred poets represented in the anthologies are more urgently united in the solidarity of their artistic endeavor than they are in any specifically rigid attitude or school of thought” (Denommé 17).