Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas

Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas (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 had great influence on French literature, as both poet and critic. He established the principles of French classical literature 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; volumes of Épîtres (Epistles, begun in 1669); The Art of Poetry (1674; trans. 1683), in imitation of Horace’s Ars Poetica, in which Boileau analyzed the various kinds of poetry and laid down the principles governing their composition; 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.