François de Malherbe

François de Malherbe (Caen, 1555-Paris, October 16, 1628) was a French poet, critic and translator.

Biography

He was born in Caen, his family had a certain social position. The poet was the eldest son of François de Malherbe, King's Counselor in the magistracy of Caen. He was educated in Caen, Paris, Heidelberg and Basel. At the age of twenty-one, in Provence, he served as secretary to Prince Henri d'Angoulême, natural son of Henry II of France. There he married in 1581. Apparently he wrote some verses in this period, but, judging from a quote from Tallemant des Réaux, they must have been very bad.

His employer died while he was on a visit to his native province, and for some time he had no particular employment, although for some commissioned verses he obtained a considerable reward in money from Henry III of France. He married the daughter of a Speaker of Parliament. In this period, Malherbe lived between Provence and Normandy, and very little is known of his life. His Tears of Saint Peter appeared in 1587.

In 1600, he presented Maria de' Medici with an ode of welcome, the first of his poems of merit. But four or five more years passed before her luck changed. His compatriot, Cardinal Du Perron, presented him to Henry IV of France and although at first he did not show great interest in the poet, happy with the Prayer for the Ret who travels to Limousin he summoned him to court., in which he was the official poet for the rest of the reign, during the regency of Marie de' Medici and until his death under the reign of Louis XIII. It is said that the pension promised to him was not paid until the next reign. His father died in 1606 and he inherited.

From then on, he lived at court, together with his wife but seeing each other only occasionally. As an official poet, he celebrates political events and Cardinal Richelieu. He surrounds himself with faithful disciples, such as Racan and Mainard, and becomes the guardian of the purity of poetic language. His old age was saddened by great misfortune. His son, Marc-Antoine, died in a duel in 1626. Malherbe went to the siege of La Rochelle to ask King Louis

François died in Paris on October 16, 1628 at the age of seventy-three.

The theorist

Regardless of the value of his literary work, in which there are works of merit, Malherbe's greatest relevance is in his role as a theorist. It should be noted that he was, along with Claude Favre Vaugelas and the French Academy, one of the champions in the process dedicated to imposing French spoken by the nobility in France to the detriment of popular variants. In his attacks on excesses, not even the work of his youth, the Tears of Saint Peter , will be spared. From his purist philosophical stance, he will attack the followers of Italian Marin, as well as all foreign languages and more, all provincial variants of French, defending only the & lt; & lt; cultured & gt; language. gt; that was written in their social environment.

In his literary production he evolved from baroque exuberance towards classical sobriety. The most important thing for this writer was the technique, not the inspiration. The Malherbe school took French poetry to extremes of great technical purification, but sometimes lacking in genius and feeling. Malherbe did not write any poetic treatise, his ideology can be compiled from the corrections of Desportes' work. According to him, poetry should be based on containment and clarity. Rigor and harmony are for him more suitable for poetry than verbal excesses. It is worth highlighting that this position corresponds to the political context in which he lived and the social position that he represented in that context. On the other hand, he is prescriptive and uncompromising, and had a great following among some of the literati.

The theorist Boileau glosses the figure of Malherbe as that of a regenerator of a poetry lost in excess, in the verses of his Poetic Art of 1674:

And Malherbe arrived, the first in France
who made verses of perfect cadence.