ISAAC DE BENSERADE (1674)

Minor but brilliant literary light of the courts of Louis XIII and Louis XIV.

He began visiting the Hôtel de Rambouillet, the literary centre of Paris in 1634 and wrote a succession of romantic verses that won him a reputation culminating in the sonnets controversy of 1649 in which Benserade´s sonnet "Job" was pitted against Vincent Voiture´s "Uranie" in a lively court debate over poetic style. Though Benserade was adjudged the loser, he became a favourite and was repeatedly called on to write libretti for royal ballets, a function he discharged with a wit often regarded by his court audience as daring and even impertinent.

Elected to the Académie Française in 1674, he was criticized in 1676 for his Metamorphoses d´Ovide en rondeaux.

He distinguished himself by his support of the candidacy of La Fontaine for the Académie and by his defense of the rationalism of Pierre Bayle, which the censorship threatened.

Besides his poems and libretti, he wrote several dramas.