Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > The Parnassian Movement - Overviews

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Aaron Schaffer (essay date 1929)

SOURCE: "Parnassus in France," in Parnassus in France: Currents and Cross-Currents in Nineteenth-Century French Lyric Poetry, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1929, pp. 46–71.

[In the following excerpt, Schaffer provides an overview and history of the Parnassian movement, focusing on the poets and poetry featured in the three volumes of Le Parnasse contemporain.]

Romanticism had freed literature of the fetters that had so long shackled it, and now men no longer blushed to pour out their souls in verse and to give these verses to be read by others. In the hands of Lamartine, Hugo, Vigny, and Musset, lyric poetry again became in France one of the dominant genres; in those of Gautier it became a "thing of beauty" rather than of passion or of metaphysical contemplation. The stage was set for an efflorescence of lyric poetry such as France has seldom known; this efflorescence we...

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1. Introduction
2. Representative Works
3. Overviews
4. Parnassians And Epic Form
5. Parnassianism And Positivism
6. Further Reading
7. Copyright