Boileau has traditionally been regarded as the spokesman of French neo-classicism, but some elements of scholarship have discounted the importance of neo-classical doctrine in general and of Boileau's particular contribution to it. Many critical approaches have stressed instead the liveliness and wit of Boileau's poems, his love of language and his passionate temperament. Mr Pocock uses these critical approaches to demonstrate in detail how Boileau's verve, love of contrasts, and essentially dramatic imagination animate the major poems. But he also argues that such approaches do not in...

Corneille and Racine may seem like marble monuments of an unchanging typical classicism. Mr Pocock is concerned to show that each of these great dramatists was a living writer, struggling to create developing forms and that the rules of neo-classical decorum were a strait-jacket to them. We can see in their writings a hesitation between poetic drama which creates its own forms from within and naturalistic drama which opts for truth to common life and a medium. In an interesting and comprehensive examination of the two authors, Mr Pocock shows the range of Coneille's achievement, and explains...