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Nikola Bualo-DepreoFrench poet, classicist theorist
Date of Birth: 01.11.1636
Country:  France |
Content:
Biography of Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux
Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux was a French poet and theoretician of classicism. Born as the fifteenth child in a wealthy judicial clerk's family, he lost his mother at the age of two. From 1643 to 1652, he studied at the colleges of Arcueil and Beauvais, where he received a thorough classical education. At the insistence of his family, he took holy orders in 1646, but the career of a clergyman did not appeal to him, and he began studying law (1652-1656). Thanks to a modest inheritance he received in 1657, Boileau abandoned his legal studies and devoted himself entirely to poetry and literary criticism. Between 1660 and 1666, he wrote his first Satires, partly imitating Horace and Juvenal, but also showing undeniable originality as an author. The main innovation was that Boileau began naming bad poets by name, disregarding the social conventions of his time. The Satires were successful, and pirated editions soon appeared in France and the Netherlands. Between 1668 and 1677, a series of poetic Epistles were published. In 1674, the Satires and some of the Epistles were republished in a collected edition of his works. It was in this collection that the anonymous translation (usually attributed to Longinus) of the Greek treatise On the Sublime and the Art of Poetry were published for the first time. Boileau's most famous work, The Art of Poetry, was long considered a textbook of classical "rules" that supposedly had to be followed by foolish contemporaries. Boileau did indeed manage to put many prescriptions and definitions into astonishing Alexandrine stanzas, but his insistence on the role of passion and power in the aesthetic experience was much more significant and original. These considerations also explain his longstanding interest in the Greek treatise On the Sublime.
Later Years and Legacy
In 1677, together with his close friend Jean Racine, Boileau obtained the honorary position of historiographer at the court of Louis XIV, and in 1684, at the king's insistence, he was elected to the French Academy. In 1685, he purchased a house in Auteuil (now a fashionable Parisian suburb). Leading an almost reclusive life, he hosted the most renowned writers and theologians of his time. In his later years, the role of Boswell to the aging poet was played by a young lawyer from Lyon, Charles Brosset, who in 1716 published a complete collection of Boileau's works with his own commentary. The majority of Boileau's works written in Auteuil were polemical in nature. In January 1687, Charles Perrault read a poem at a meeting of the French Academy in which he proclaimed the spiritual superiority of the "Age of Louis the Great" over antiquity. In response to this and subsequent attempts to discredit the classical heritage, Boileau released Critical Reflections on Some Passages by the Rhetorician Longinus, in which he used deadly irony to present evidence of Perrault's almost unbelievable ignorance.
