Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux

Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636-1711), French poet and critic, born in Paris, and educated at the Sorbonne. About 1670 he was granted an annual pension by Louis XIV, who made Boileau his historiographer in 1677. In 1684 Boileau was elected to the French Academy.

Boileau greatly influenced French literature, as both poet and critic. He established the principles of French classical literature in his treatise L'Art poétique (1674), imitating Horace's Ars Poetica and was called the “lawgiver of Parnassus”. His works include 12 satires (begun in 1660), in rhymed couplets, which contain wittily barbed criticism of contemporary writers or well known public figures; volumes of Épîtres (Epistles, begun in 1669); and Le Lutrin (The Lectern, 1674), a mock-heroic poem that was later used by the English poet Alexander Pope as a model for Rape of the Lock. His work was also to influence the poetry of Dryden and Dr Johnson.