Jean Racine baptismal name Jean-Baptiste Racine was a French dramatist, one of the three great playwrights of 17th-century France (along with Moliere and Corneille) and an important literary figure in the Western tradition.
Racine was primarily a tragedian, producing such “examples of neoclassical perfection” as Phedre, Andromaque and Athalie, although he did write one comedy, Les Plaideurs and a muted tragedy, Esther, for the young.
Racine’s plays displayed his mastery of the dodecasyllabic alex and rine; he is renowned for elegance, purity, speed and fury and for what Robert Lowell described as a “diamond-edge” and the “glory of its hard, electric rage”. The linguistic effects of Racine’s poetry are widely considered to be untranslatable, although many eminent poets have attempted to do so, including Lowell, Richard Wilbur, Ted Hughes, Tony Harrison, and Derek Mahon into English and Fried rich Schiller into German.
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