France Literature: 17th Century
The new century opens with a reformer of the poetic language: François de Malherbe (1555-1628), who blames the poets of the Pléiade for the too many Latin neologisms they had used, for the too many Italian and Spanish borrowings, for not having sufficiently cared the form, invoking a drastic purge of the language and the adoption of precise rules in versification. Maynard (1582-1646) and Racan (1589-1670) immediately listened to it, others opposed it and Boileau (1636-1711) perfected it. Guez de…