BOILEAU (Boileau-Despréaux), Nicolas. - French writer, b. in Paris on 1 Nov. 1636, d. there on 13 March 1711. He was able to devote himself entirely to poetry only at the death of his father, who had imposed on him the study of law.
He always lived in Paris, frequenting men of letters and artists, and he won the favor of Louis XIV, who granted him a pension and, together with Racine, appointed him court historiographer. In 1687 he entered the Academy and, from then until his late years, he enjoyed that fame and that prestige which were to accompany his memory throughout the whole 18th century.
In 1666 the little volume of his Satires was published, which met with great success because they offered, among literary reminiscences, many allusions to contemporary figures and a vivid and realistic representation of the Parisian circles most familiar to the poet. There followed twelve Épîtres, the translation of the Traité du sublime attributed to Longinus; Le lutrin, a mock-heroic poem which, from the formal point of view, is B.'s most elaborate and perfect work. More than a poet, B. was a critic who took pleasure in judging and condemning many works of his contemporaries, offering then, in the famous Art poétique in which, down to Romanticism, the code of French and European poetry would be seen, numerous precepts of an aesthetic character which, being expressed in a simple and definitive manner, acquire the value of true and proper maxims, and make B. appear, more than he actually was, the codifier of classical poetry, the one who best knew how to orient and direct the taste of the contemporary public.
From Cartesian philosophy B. deduces the concept of universal and absolute reason and the evidence of the truth to which beauty must conform and which, in its supreme expression, will be above all intelligible. Banished from art are the fantastic, the improbable, the burlesque; condemned are history because it is contingent and lyric poetry because it is too individual, B. proclaims the triumph of generality and abstraction which, in order not to degenerate into the commonplace and the trivial, must however be assisted by perfection of form and ennobled by skillful embellishments of versification and style. In the dispute between the supporters of the ancients and of the moderns, B. makes himself the champion of the ancients, whom he acknowledges as unsurpassed masters in the art of imitating nature by grasping its eternal and immutable essence.
A reasoning spirit par excellence and therefore little inclined to mysticism and to theological discussions, B. considered the Christian religion as a rule of conduct for the artist; he was not devoid of sympathy for the Jansenists and wrote the Épître pour l'amour de Dieu, which led him to polemicize with the Jesuits.
The first edition, but incomplete, of B.'s works, and the last supervised by the author, is that of 1701; complete editions are instead, among others, those of M. Berriat-Saint-Prix (Oeuvres complètes de B., 4 vols., Paris 1830) and of Ch. Louandre (ibid. 1886); L'Art poétique was published with ample commentary by P. Delaporte (3 vols., Lille 1888); useful is the work of E. Magne, Bibliographie générale des oeuvres de N. B.-D. (Paris 1929).
Bibliography7 works
Maria Teresa Sposato