Definition of "Parnassianism"

The leading poets of Parnassianism, like Machado, were utterly respectable and middle classs, good family men; many were bureaucrats, and they were proud that they had freed poets from "the obligation to wear their hair long" (Bilac, in Broca, 1960:7). Symbolism was enormously influential in almost every other Western culture; it never had a chance in Brazil, in a literary world dominated by Parnassianism and its disciples.

1983, David T. Haberly, Three Sad Races: Racial Identity and National Consciousness in Brazilian Literature, Cambridge University Press, page 100

The autonomy of art, the distaste for the bourgeois world, the heightening of artifice, the affinity for sculpture and architecture, the use of exotic imagery in an objective way— all these are general elements of Parnassianism that seem to have found their way into Salammbô.

1995, David Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism, University of Massachusetts Press, page 36

Positioned between the rise of Parnassianism and Symbolism in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the drastic innovations of Modernism in 1911, the period from 1900 to 1911 brought no dramatic changes of direction to Brazilian poetry.

1996, Marta Peixoto, “11: Brazilian Poetry from 1900 to 1912”, in Roberto Gonzalez Echevarría, Enrique Pupo-Walker, editors, The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature, Volume 3, Cambridge University Press, page 233