BOILEAU (BOILEAU-DESPREAUX), NICOLAS. — French writer, born in Paris on 1 November 1636, died there on 13 March 1711. He was able to devote himself entirely to
poetry only after the death of his father, who had imposed upon him the study of jurisprudence.
He lived always in Paris, associating with writers and artists, and 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 the most advanced age, enjoyed that fame and prestige which were to accompany his memory throughout the eighteenth century.
In 1666 the booklet containing his Satire was published; they enjoyed great success because, amid their literary reminiscences, they offered many allusions to contemporary figures and a lively, realistic representation of the Parisian milieus most familiar to the poet. Twelve Épitres followed, as well as the translation of the Traité du sublime attributed to Longinus; Le latrin, a mock-heroic poem which, from a 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 by his contemporaries, later offering, in the famous Art poétique, in which the code of French and European poetry was to be seen until Romanticism, numerous precepts of an aesthetic nature which, because expressed in a simple and definitive manner, acquire the value of genuine maxims, and make B. appear, more than he actually was, the codifier of classical poetry, the man who best knew how to orient and direct the taste of the contemporary public.
From Cartesian philosophy B. deduced the concept of universal and absolute reason and the evidence of truth to which beauty must conform, and which, in its supreme expression, will above all be intelligible. Having banished the fantastic, the improbable, and the burlesque from art; having condemned history because it is contingent and lyric poetry because it is too individual, B. proclaimed the triumph of generality and abstraction which, in order not to degenerate into the commonplace and the vulgar, must nevertheless be assisted by perfection of form and ennobled by learned embellishments of versification and style. In the dispute between the supporters of the ancients and those of the moderns, B. became the champion of the ancients, whom he recognized as unsurpassed masters in the art of imitating nature by grasping its eternal and immutable essence.
A pre-eminently rationalizing spirit and therefore little inclined toward mysticism and theological discussions, B. regarded the Christian religion as a rule of conduct for the artist; he was not without sympathy for the Jansenists and wrote the Épître pour l'amour de Dieu, which led him to polemicize with the Jesuits.
The first, though incomplete, edition of B.'s works, and the last prepared by the author, is that of 1701; complete editions include, among others, those of M. Berriat-Saint-Prix (Oeuvres complètes de B., 4 vols., Paris 1830) and Ch. Louandre (there 1886); L'Art poétique was published with an extensive 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).