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3 - Poetry, 1660-1740

from GENRES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
James Sambrook
Edited by
H. B. Nisbet  and
Claude Rawson
H. B. Nisbet
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Claude Rawson
Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut
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Summary

French: to 1700

Critic Learning flourish'd most in France

(Pope, Essay on Criticism)

With one of those left-handed compliments that are often directed across the English Channel Dryden in his Dedication of the Aeneid, 1697, candidly concedes that, ‘impartially speaking, the French are as much better critics than the English, as they are worse poets’; he calls Le Bossu ‘the best of modern critics’, allows the critical writings of Boileau and Rapin to be ‘the greatest of this age’, and speaks respectfully of Bouhours and Saint-Évremond (Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesy, I, pp. 2.46, 199, II, pp. 56-8).

The Traité du poème éepique (1675) of René Le Bossu (1631-89) provided for its period the most authoritative modern treatise on what, it was generally agreed, was the highest genre of poetry. Le Bossu shares the neo-classical view that poetry was brought to perfection by the ancients, ‘therefore they who practise afterwards the same art are obliged to tread in their footsteps, and to search in their writings the foundation of them; for it is not just that new rules should destroy the authority of the old’ (Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesy, I, p. 246). Le Bossu's moderate tone, more judicious than judicial, appealed to the scientific temper of his age. The anonymous English translator of the Traité in 1695 said of him:

What he takes from Aristotle and Horace he explains, improves and refines: What is his own, though never so judicious and rational, he lays down not in a dogmatical, magisterial way, but by way of problem; and what he asserts with an air of confidence, though not his masters' thoughts, yet seem to be natural deductions from what they have wrote about it.

(Clark Boileau p. 250)
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism , pp. 73 - 116
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1997

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