SOURCE: "Jean Racine," in An Introduction to the French Poets: Villon to the Present Day, revised edition, Methuen & Co Ltd, 1973, pp. 67-81.

Brereton is an English scholar who has written extensively on French literature of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. In the following excerpt, he examines specifically the poetry of Racine's dramas.

Racine is considered here almost exclusively as a poet. He was, in fact, a dramatic poet and any division is necessarily artificial. But any attempt to do justice to the dramatist would lead us far beyond the bounds of our subject and we must be content with illustrating this side of his genius with a single example. To go further in that direction might obscure a truth which English readers sometimes find it difficult to accept—that, apart from the requirements of the stage, Racine was a supreme verbal artist. His verse, as verse, has...