SOURCE: "Second Cycle: Racine, the Sun in Phèdre" in Love in Literature: Studies in Symbolic Expression, 1965. Reprint by Books for Libraries Press, 1972, pp. 51-7.

Fowlie is among the most respected and comprehensive scholars of French literature. His work includes translations of major poets and dramatists of France (Molière, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Claudel, Saint-John Perse) and critical studies of the major figures and movements of modern French letters (Stephane Mallarmé, Marcel Proust, Andre Gidé, the Surrealists, among many others). Broad intellectual and artistic sympathies, along with an acute sensitivity for French writing and a firsthand understanding of literary creativity (he is the author of a novel and poetry collections in both French and English), are among the qualities that make Fowlie an indispensable guide for the student of French literature. In the following excerpt from an essay originally published in 1948, he explicates Phèdre as...