A Comparative Study of Classical Principles in Nicola Boileauʼs Art of Poetry and Persian Literature

The comparative study of literary movements is an important area of research in comparative literature. The School of Classicism yields itself to a comparative study with Persian Classicism. The Art of Poetry, written by Nicola Boileau, the French poet and literary theorist, is, in fact, the manifesto of the French Classicism in the seventeenth century. In the first part of the present essay, after a short review of the cultural and literary life of the seventeenth century France, the basic thoughts of Boileau are elaborated. Then, to better understand the place of Boileau’s art of poetry in the history of literary theory, an outline of this long tradition that begins with Aristotle and continues by writers like Longinus and Horace is drawn. The second part of the essay deals with the important ideas that Boileau expressed in the first chant of L’art poétique translated entirely here in Persian for the first time. This study shows that Boileau’s Art of Poetry can be used as an appropriate basis for a comparative study of Persian and European classical literature