Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux, commonly called Boileau, (November 1, 1636 – March 13, 1711) was a French poet and critic. He was born in the rue de Jerusalem, in Paris.
The name Despréaux was derived from a small property at Crosne near Villeneuve-Saint-Georges. He was the fifteenth child of Gilles Boileau, a clerk in the parlement. Two of his brothers attained some distinction: Gilles Boileau (1631-1669), the author of a translation of Epictetus; and Jacques Boileau, who became a canon of the Sainte-Chapelle, and made valuable contributions to church history. His mother died when he was two years old; and Nicolas Boileau, who had a delicate constitution, seems to have suffered something from want of care.
Sainte-Beuve puts down his somewhat hard and unsympathetic outlook quite as much to the uninspiring circumstances of these days as to the general character of his time. He cannot be said to have been early disenchanted, for he never seems to have had any illusions; he grew up with a single passion, "the hatred of stupid books." He was educated at the College de Beauvais, and was then sent to study theology at the Sorbonne. He exchanged theology for law, however, and was called to the bar on December 4, 1656. From the profession of law, after a short trial, he recoiled in disgust, complaining bitterly of the amount of chicanery which passed under the name of law and justice. His father died in 1657, leaving him a small fortune, and thenceforward he devoted himself to letters.
In 1674 his two masterpieces, L'Art poétique and Le Lutrin, were published with some earlier works as the L'OEuvres diverses du sieur D.... The first, in imitation of the Ars Poetica of Horace, lays down the code for all future French verse, and may be said to fill in French literature a parallel place to that held by its prototype in Latin. On English literature the maxims of Boileau, through the translation revised by Dryden, and through the magnificent imitation of them in Pope's Essay on Criticism, have exercised no slight influence. Boileau does not merely lay down rules for the language of poetry, but analyses carefully the various kinds of verse composition, and enunciates the principles peculiar to each.
Of the four books of L'Art poetique, the first and last consist of general precepts, inculcating mainly the great rule of bon sens; the second treats of the pastoral, the elegy, the ode, the epigram and satire; and the third of tragic and epic poetry. Though the rules laid down are of value, their tendency is rather to hamper and render too mechanical the efforts of poetry. Boileau himself, a great, though, by no means infallible critic in verse, cannot be considered a great poet. He rendered the utmost service in destroying the exaggerated reputations of the mediocrities of his time, but his judgment was sometimes at fault. The Lutrin, a mock heroic poem, of which four cantos appeared in 1674, furnished Alexander Pope with a model for the Rape of the Lock, but the English poem is superior in richness of imagination and subtlety of invention. The fifth and sixth cantos, afterwards added by Boileau, rather detract from the beauty of the poem; the last canto in particular is quite unworthy of his genius.