de La Fontaine, Jean

de La Fontaine, Jean (1621 - 1695)

Index to poems
  1. L'Alouette et ses petits, avec le Maitre d'un champ
  2. La Grenouille qui se veut faire aussi grosee que le bœuf
  3. Le Corbeau et le renard
  4. Le Loup et l'agneau
  5. Les Animaux malades de la peste
  6. Les Deux Pigeons
Biography

Jean de La Fontaine (1621-1695) is the most widely read and the best loved of French classical writers. In France every school child studies his fables and leams some of them by heart. La Fontaine is a conscientious artist who also wrote longer poems and Contes et nouvelles en vers, and it is a mistake to think of him as writing primarily for children. Even in the fables, the apparently facile charm is a result of astonishing technical effect that allows us to apprehend the animal characters as innocent woodland denizens, seventeenth-century courtiers, or universal types as true today as when they were conceived three hundred years ago.

  • "Jean de La Fontaine." Representative French Poetry. Ed. Victor E. Graham. 2nd edn. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965. 20-28.
Given Name
Jean
Family Name
de La Fontaine
Birth Date
July 8, 1621
Death Date
April 13, 1695
Nationality
French
Literary Period
Unknown
Literary Movement
Unknown
First RPO Edition
2012