At the head of the true Parnassians stand Theophilo Dias, Raymundo Correia, Alberto de Oliveira and Olavo Bilac, though Verissimo sees in the Miniaturas of Gonçalves Crespo “the first manifestation of Parnassian poetry published here.”[6] Crespo was not out-and-out Parnassian, however, as was Affonso Celso in his Telas sonantes of 1876. The very title—Sounding Canvases, i. e., pictures that sing their poetry—is in itself a program. Brazilian Parnassianism thus begins, according to Verissimo, in the decade 1880-1890. Sonetos e Rimas, by Luiz Guimarães, appears in 1879; Raymundo Correia’s Symphonias are of 1883, his Versos e Versões, of 1884; Alberto de Oliveira’s Meridionaes are of 1884, and the Sonetas e poemas of 1886. In the very year that the Nicaraguan, Darío, with a tiny volume of prose and poetry called Azul… and published in Chile, was initiating the “modernist” overturn in Spanish America, Bilac was issuing (1888) his Poesias.
Brazilian Parnassianism, as we have seen, is less objective, less impersonal than its French prototype. Poetic tradition and national character were alike opposed to the Gallic finesse, erudition, ultra-refinement. Pick up the many so-called Parnassian poems of Spanish or Portuguese America, remove the names of the authors and the critical excrescences, and see how difficult it is—from the evidence of the poem itself—to apply the historical label.
Theophilo Dias is hardly the self-controlled chiseller of Greek marbles. How “Parnassian,” for example, is such a verse as this, speaking of his lady’s voice?
Exerce sobre mim um brando despotismo
Que me orgulha, e me abate;—e ha nesse magnetismo
Uma forca tamanha, uma electricidade,
Que me fascina e prende as bordas de um abysmo,
Sem que eu tente fugir,—inerte, sem vontade.[7]
This is not the kind of thought that produces genuine Parnassian poetry. How “impersonal” is it? How “sculptural”? More than one poem of the “Romanticist” Machado de Assis is far more Parnassian.
And listen to this description, by Carvalho, of Raymundo Correia. How “Parnassian” does it sound? “Anger, friendship, hatred, jealousy, terror, hypocrisy, all the tints and half-tints of human illusion, all that is closest to our innermost heart … he weighed and measured, scrutinized and analysed with the patient care of a naturalist who was, at the same time, a prudent and well-informed psychologist. Nor is this all.… Raymundo is an admirable painter of our landscape, an exquisite impressionist, who reflects, with delicious sentiment, the light and shade of the Brazilian soil.”[8]