The article focuses on the creativity by the French poet, novelist, essayist, art critic Henri de Regnier (1864–1936). The representative of the symbolic and Parnassian schools, he added much to the French culture of the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth. The author of the article studies the way nature and culture, life and art are revealed in the writer’s creativity. The poet follows a Parnassian principle that makes works of applied art or exotic messengers of Greek and Roman mythology or landscape-gardening the only object worth portraying. On the whole, the opposition ‘natural – artificial’ is investigated. The article is of special interest for professors, postgraduates, students of French literature, for those who feel like learning more about the French literature of the period.