Boileau's was the greatest literary and personal success that a man in the seventeenth century could know.
Background
The 15th child of a well-to-do clerk in the Paris Parlement, Boileau lost his mother at the age of two.
Having early in his career caught the notice of Louis XIV, he was to enjoy substantial royal pensions throughout his lifetime. The king is reported always to have taken special delight in having Boileau read to him. In 1677, he was appointed, jointly with his close friend, Jean Racine, to the elevated post of royal historiographer. The chronicle of Louis' reign, at which both poets worked devotedly for many years, was destroyed by fire when only partially completed; owing to Boileau's poor health it was not resumed. It was at the King's insistence that Boileau was elected to the French Academy in 1684.
In France Boileau's reputation began to wane in the late eighteenth century and suffered greatly during the romantic rebellion. To this day, however, he is widely read in French schools. The Art of Poetry was translated into English in 1683 by Sir William Soames; the Complete Works in 1712. Much admired during the Augustan period, Boileau won particular praise from Dryden and Pope, the latter being the English writer who most closely approaches Boileau in tone and style. The Essay on Criticism levies frequently on the Art of Poetry.
Boileau died in 1711. In 1800 his remains were transferred from the Sainte-Chapelle to the Museum of French Monuments and thence, nine years later, to the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
Education
Between the years 1643 and 1652 he received a sound classical education at the collèges (colleges) of Harcourt and Beauvais. Although tonsured in 1646, he showed no inclination for the ecclesiastical career urged upon him by his family, and went on to study law (1652-1656). In 1656 he was admitted to the Paris bar but was soon to abandon forever the legal profession that he had entered less than halfheartedly.
A modest inheritance in 1657 enabled Boileau to give up law and devote the rest of his days to poetry and literary criticism.
Career
In 1674 the Satires and some of the Epistles were reprinted in Boileau's Collected Works. Appearing for the first time in this volume were the "Lectern," a mock-heroic poem about a dispute between two clerics on the placement of a lectern in a chapel; the translation of the anonymous (though often attributed to Longinus) Greek treatise On the Sublime; and the Art of Poetry.
In 1685 Boileau took up residence at Auteuil, now a smart suburb of Paris but then considered the country. There, in semiretirement, he received the most celebrated men of letters and ecclesiastics of the time. Auteuil soon became an essential pilgrimage for aspiring young poets and distinguished travelers from abroad; Joseph Addison has left an enlightening record of one such sojourn at Auteuil. The final consecration of Boileau's fame was guaranteed by Claude Brossette, a young lawyer from Lyon, who played Boswell to the aging poet during his later years. His annotated edition of Boileau's Complete Works appeared in 1716. The exaggerated reminiscences recorded by Brossette are largely responsible for the inaccuracies and myths that accompanied Boileau's fame down to the present century. The naïvenaive scribe of a particularly vain old man, Brossette was made to imagine Boileau as the Legislator of Parnassus who had put down, single-handed, the literary heresies of the older generation.
Most of Boileau's writings during the Auteuil period were polemical in nature. In January 1687 Charles Perrault read to the French Academy a poem claiming the cultural superiority of the Century of Louis the Great to ancient Greece and Rome. In reply to this and subsequent attacks on the classical tradition Boileau wrote the Critical Reflections on Longinus which, with much humor and irony, detailed Perrault's often incredible ignorance. With the twelfth Epistle (1695-1698) Boileau lashed out, like Pascal before him, at religious casuistry, lampooning with characteristic verve the opinion held by some Jesuits that love of God is not prerequisite to grace. Controversy on this point grew so hot that Louis XIV felt obliged to prohibit publication of a renewed attack by Boileau in the twelfth Satire (1705-1711; published posthumously in 1713).
