For more than three hundred years Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux has been the subject of many literary commentaries. From this mass of books, articles, pamphlets, poems, and polemical tracts, two distinct Boileaus have risen. One is the legendary législateur du Parnasse (legislator of Parnassus), the abstract figure who coldly judged poets and writers both contemporary and past, condemning those who did not measure up to his neoclassical standards of taste and celebrating those who did. In this mythical view he emerges as the supreme authority who admitted to the Pantheon some of the most glorified writers in French literary history--Jean Racine, Molière, and Jean La Fontaine--and cast down from Mount Parnassus those writers unworthy of immortality. Generations of French schoolchildren were taught this version of an inhuman, remote, god-like Boileau who inspired only antipathy. Despite its satirical bent, his best-known work, L'Art poé...