The Art of Poetry

Following in the footsteps of Horace s Ars Poetica, Boileau s Art of Poetry lays down, in four entertaining books dealing with all forms and genres of poetry, the codes and rules for good versification. This beautiful translation proved to have a lasting influence on the future shape of English literature among others, it was imitated magnificently by Pope in his Essay on Criticism, who also took Lutrin as a model for his own masterpiece, The Rape of the Lock. Now reprinted for the first time in more than a century, Sir William Soames s 1683 verse translation of Boileau s poetical masterpiece revised by the great poet John Dryden here appears together with an eighteenth-century version of his hugely influential mock-heroic poem, Lutrin, with the original French text on facing pages.