Louis Racine

Louis Racine was a French poet of the Age of the Enlightenment. The second son and the seventh and last child of the celebrated tragic dramatist Jean Racine, he was interested in poetry from childhood but was dissuaded from trying to make it his career by the poet Boileau on the grounds that the gift never existed in two successive generations. However, in 1719 Racine became a member of the Académie des Inscriptions and published his first major poem, La Grâce, in 1722. His most important poem, La Religion, in which he was careful to avoid further accusations of Jansenism, was published in 1742. He was born on 6 November 1692 in Paris, France.