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]