The New Poetry

• Romanticism, Realism, and Naturalism were the leading literary movements of the nineteenth century.  As the century advanced, national boundaries began to be less confining, as movements found adherents all over Europe.  Together with this cosmopolitan trend we find another tendency.  It becomes increasingly difficult, as we progress towards and into the twentieth century, to identify authors with the same certainty with which we can call Wordsworth a Romantic and Zola a Naturalist.  Writers like Ibsen defy absolute departmentalization; they wrote sometimes in one school, sometimes in another.  In many cases one must be content to observe the tendency of individual works without aligning the writer with one school or another.  New schools did, nonetheless, continue to appear (and continue to appear); of these the most important were the Parnassian movement and the Symbolist movement.

• The Parnassian movement of the nineteenth century was to a degree the offspring of French Romantic poet Théophile Gautier’s insistence on the doctrine of “art for art’s sake,” and his stress on form as of paramount importance in literature.  One thing can certainly be said about the Parnassians:  They were writing in strong reaction against the effusiveness of Romanticism.  They were also in reaction against the values of a middle-class society absorbed in industrial advancement.

• The name “Parnassian” was meant to signify that these writers abandoning the subjectivism and storminess of the Romantic movement were as objective and as calm in their reflections as the Olympian gods.  These poets were indeed sometimes called “les impassibles” (“the poets who cannot be moved”).  Charles Leconte de Lisle, leader of the movement, in 1852 had already stated its ideals:

There is vanity and even profanation in publicly expressing the anguish of the heart.…However powerful the political passions of the time may be, they belong to the world of action, not of thought.…We must find solace in the contemplative life, in learning, as a sanctuary of peace.…Art and science, too long separated…, must operate to unite closely.
• It would also be fair to say that the Parnassian movement also owes something to the rise of Realism.  Realism being unsuited to their poetic visions, the Parnassians’ objection to Romantic excess took the shape of a new classical enthusiasm for form and objective observation.

• Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine dissociated themselves from the Parnassian movement and became the leaders of the Symbolist movement—and were, moreover, in complete disagreement with each other.  The Symbolist movement was a Romantic reaction against the Parnassian movement.  To the newer poets the Parnassians were too unfeelingly objective and placed too much emphasis on form.  They accused Leconte de Lisle, Gautier, and Hérédia of being materialistic; for the same reason they objected to the Realist novel.  They charged Parnassians with exiling thought by emphasizing the perfection of their chiseled lines.

• Above all, the Symbolists wished their lines to suggest, rather than to state, a meaning.  They were interested in what the poem could evoke, not in what it could expressly state.  They were highly subjective and sought to evoke mystery and magic by the music of their verse and its imagery.  Their chief predecessor was Baudelaire because of his innovations in exploring varied sensations.  The meaning of their poems is always to be found between, not in, the lines.

• The Symbolists claimed affinities to the art of music, and indeed were enthusiastic Wagnerians.  They often remind us of their contemporaries, the English Pre-Raphaelites.  As a matter of fact, the whole tendency of the Symbolist movement is more akin to the traditions of English poetry, in which the power to suggest associated ideas is not uncommon.

• At the beginning their movement was stigmatized with the appellation Decadent, a term they were willing enough to accept, and by which they are often still designated.
 

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