Antoine Houdar de La Motte
La Motte, Antoine Houdar de (Antoine Houdart de La Motte) (1672-1731). French playwright and poet. Educated by the Jesuits, he qualified as a lawyer but devoted himself to literature. His work includes fables, odes, opera, pastorals, and tragedies. The odes were overshadowed by those of J.-B. Rousseau, and of his plays the only one to achieve success was Inès de Castro (1723), an edifying tragedy on a medieval subject [see Reine Morte, la]. A friend of Fontenelle, he championed the cause of the moderns in the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, prefacing his ‘improved’ version of the Iliad (1714) with a discourse criticizing the Greek poet from the point of view of modern rational politeness. He argued against Madame Dacier's criticism and attacked uncritical admiration of antiquity in his urbane and unrepentant Réflexions sur la critique (1715). A prolific poet, for whom the main merit of verse lay in ‘la difficulté vaincue’, he later argued for the superiority of prose, producing prose versions of Sophocles' Oedipus and Racine's Mithridate.
[Peter France]
