Leconte de Lisle's "Midi" exemplifies poésie parnassienne in its description of the blazing Mediterranean noon: the poem achieves its extraordinary intensity not through emotional confession but through the detached, sculptural precision of its imagery and the formal perfection of its alexandrins; Hérédia's sonnet "Antoine et Cléopâtre" demonstrates the Parnassian manner at its most concentrated: a historical scene of great drama is evoked in fourteen lines with the impersonality of a bas-relief, the emotion contained entirely within the imagery and syntax without a single first-person intrusion; Théodore de Banville's "Odelettes" represent the Parnassian cultivation of classical forms, his restoration of medieval formes fixes executed with a technical brilliance that treats formal mastery as the poet's highest obligation; A student comparing poésie parnassienne with Romantic poetry should attend to differences in the use of the first person: where the Romantic poet foregrounds the speaking "I" as the poem's emotional center, the Parnassian poet systematically removes the self, making the poem a window onto external beauty rather than a mirror of internal feeling; The Parnassian aesthetic of "l'art pour l'art," art for art's sake, inherited from Théophile Gautier's Émaux et camées, insists on the poem's autonomous aesthetic value independent of any moral, didactic, or political purpose, making beauty itself the poem's sufficient justification; Sully Prudhomme's early poetry, before his increasing philosophical concerns, shows how poésie parnassienne could accommodate personal emotion within its formal constraints: the Parnassian manner does not eliminate feeling but disciplines it, forcing it to speak through form rather than against it.