Parnassian
Language: English
Part of speech: adj
Forms: form: more Parnassian
form: most Parnassian
Etymology: From Parnassus, from Latin Parnassus, from Ancient Greek Παρνασσός (Parnassós).
Senses: examples: text: King Atlas called straight to minde an auncient prophesie Made by Parnassian Themys, which this sentence did implie: The time shall one day, Atlas, come in which thy golden tree Shall of hir fayre and precious fruite dispoyld and robbed bee.
ref: 1565, Arthur Golding, The Fyrst Fower Bookes of P. Ovidius Nasos Worke, Entitled Metamorphosis, Translated Oute of Latin into Englishe Meter, London: W. Seres, translation of Metamorphoses by Publius Ovidius Naso, published 1567:
text: There is a certain poetic ground, on which a man cannot tread without feelings that enlarge the heart: the causes of human depravity vanish before the romantic enthusiasm he professes, and many who are not able to reach the Parnassian heights, may yet approach so near as to be bettered by the air of the climate.
ref: 1771, Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling, London: Cassell, published 1886, page 119:
text: The bohemian lifestyle, which had existed in Western societies since the early nineteenth century, suddenly ceased to be the domain of an artistic minority and developed into a mass "counterculture" bent on shocking the bourgeoisie. This counterculture arrived ready-made, with its [illegible] and sex, its long hair and eccentricities, the product of two centuries of slow maturation in Parnassian garrets.
ref: 1991 February 4, Owen Shows, “Start Making Sense”, in Gay Community News, volume 18, number 28, page 16:
synonyms: poetic
glosses: Of or relating to Parnassus, as the source of literary (especially poetic) inspiration; (hence) of or belonging to poetry.
examples: text: […] at last, — this is the point to be marked, - they can see things in this Parnassian way and describe them in this Parnassian tongue, without further effort of inspiration.
ref: 1864, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems and prose, Penguin Books, published 1954, page 157:
text: But in Parnassian pieces you feel that if you were the poet you could have gone on as he has done, you see yourself doing it, only with the difference that if you actually try you find you cannot write his Parnassian.
ref: 1864, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems and prose, Penguin Books, published 1954, page 158:
text: 'Behold', 'dream a dream', 'mingle': these here have something of the plangent tremulousness which comes when Tennyson is writing 'Parnassian' verse.
ref: 1989, Christopher Bruce Ricks, Tennyson, →ISBN, page 212:
text: One might be tempted to read this conjoining of exoticism and sensuality as a Parnassian exercise, until one reads the rest of the poem: […]
ref: c. 2002, Émile J. Talbot, Reading Nelligan, McGill-Queen's University Press, →ISBN, page 166:
topics: communications
journalism
literature
media
poetry
publishing
writing
glosses: Of or relating to a style of poetry or language which can only be created by poets, but not in the language of inspiration.
raw_tags: from Gerard Manley Hopkins' writings
examples: text: The Parnassian theory of art is mere imbecility.
ref: 1895, Degeneration, New York: D. Appleton and Company, translation of Entartung by Max Simon Nordau, page 270:
topics: literature
media
publishing
glosses: Of or relating to the Parnassianism movement of French poetry in the years 1850 to 1900, whose adherents rejected Romanticism and instead favored classicism with its formal structure and emotional detachment.
Derived terms: Parnassianism