Authors

French · 1636–1711

Nicolas Boileau

Nicolas Boileau was the legislator and arbiter of French neoclassicism, whose critical poem L'Art poétique (1674) codified the rules of French classical literature and set the standards of taste for his generation and the next. His mock-epic Le Lutrin (1674-1683) — about a dispute over a church lectern — became the model for Pope's The Rape of the Lock. Louis XIV appointed him and Racine joint royal historiographers.