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.