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 after his father’s death, who had imposed the study of law upon him.
He lived always in Paris, associating with men of letters and artists, and won the favor of Louis XIV, who granted him a pension and, together with Racine, appointed him historiographer to the court. In 1687 he entered the Academy, and from that time until his advanced age enjoyed the fame and prestige that were to accompany his memory throughout the 18th century.
In 1666 there appeared his little volume of Satires, which met with great success because, amid literary reminiscences, they contained many allusions to contemporary figures and a lively and realistic portrayal of the Parisian milieux most familiar to the poet. This was followed by twelve Epistles, a translation of the Treatise on the Sublime attributed to Longinus, and Le Lutrin, a mock-heroic poem that, from a formal standpoint, is Boileau’s most elaborate and perfect work. More critic than poet, Boileau took pleasure in judging and condemning many works of his contemporaries, and in his famous Art poétique, which until Romanticism would be seen as the code of French and European poetry, he set forth numerous aesthetic precepts that, because expressed in simple and definitive terms, acquire the value of genuine maxims. Thus Boileau appears, more than he actually was, as the codifier of classical poetry, the man who best knew how to guide and direct the taste of his contemporaries.
From Cartesian philosophy Boileau deduced the concept of universal and absolute reason and the evidence of truth to which beauty must conform; in its supreme expression, beauty will above all be intelligible. Banishing from art the fantastic, the improbable, and the burlesque; condemning history because it is contingent and lyric poetry because it is too individual, Boileau proclaimed the triumph of generality and abstraction, which, so as not to “degenerate into the commonplace and the vulgar,” must, however, be aided by perfection of form and ennobled by learned embellishments of versification and style. In the dispute between the partisans of the ancients and the moderns, Boileau took the side of the ancients, whom he recognized as unsurpassed masters in the art of imitating nature by seizing its eternal and immutable essence.
A thinker par excellence and therefore little inclined to mysticism and theological discussions, Boileau regarded the Christian religion as a rule of conduct for the artist; he was not without sympathy for the Jansenists and wrote the Epître pour l’amour de Dieu, which led him into controversy with the Jesuits.
The first edition, though incomplete, of Boileau’s works, and the last supervised by the author himself, is that of 1701; complete editions include, 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 has been published with 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).