The poems in set rhymes consist in composing a poem on a preset subject using rhymes given in advance.

One allots the invention of the poems in set rhymes to Dulot, a minor poet on the subject of which another thing is hardly known. The Menagiana report that one day of 1648, Dulot complained about what one had stolen to him a certain number of papers of value and, in particular, three hundred Sonnet S. As one surprised oneself of what he wrote as much, Dulot explained why they were sonnets “in white”, i.e. he had done nothing but write the rhymes and anything else. Everyone found the idea amusing and turned what Dulot had seriously done in entertainment. The poems in set rhymes knew such a vogue in the aristocratic living rooms of the 17th century that they had even right, in 1654, with their Satire by Sarasin entitled overcome Dulot or the defeat of the poems in set rhymes . The considerable success of this satire by no means prevented the composition of the poems in set rhymes from continuing during all the 17th century and most of the 18th century. The term makes its appearance in the 4th edition of the Dictionnaire of the French Academy (1762).

In 1701, Etienne Mallemans de Messanges published the Défi of the Muses , a collection of serious sonnets, all written according to rhymes chosen for him by the duchess of Maine. Neither Piron neither Marmontel nor La Motte scorned this clever exercise. This fashion knew a renewal of success at the beginning of the 19th century. Alexandre Dumas itself was interested in 1864 in it by inviting all the poets French to show their poetic talents while composing on rhymes chosen for the circumstance by the poet Joseph Méry. Dumas less gathered then the answers of step than 350 authors in a volume published in 1865.

Poems in set rhymes ordered on the beautiful-air

This sonnet was composed by Molière with the rhymes which provides him the prince de Condé.

That you embarrass me with your frog

Which trails with its heels the soft word of will hypocras!

I hate poems in set rhymes puerile the will fatras

And hold that it would be to better spin a stopper rod .

the glory of the beautiful air does not have anything which me tickle;

You strike me the spirit with a large rubble;

And I hold happy those which died in Coutras,

Seeing all paper that in sonnets one smears.

overpowers Me derechef the hatred of the canting hypocrite,

Plus malicious thousand times than is not an old man nest egg,

Plutôt than a poem in set rhymes makes me enter in dance!

I sing it clearly to you, like a goldfinch;

At the end of the universe I flee in a manse.

Good-bye, large Prince, good-bye; you hold guilleret.

Poems in set rhymes with the cinema

In the film Ridicule , of Patrice Leconte, of which the intrigue is held at the 18th century at the court of king de France, a scene presents the exercise of the poems in set rhymes as the stake of a war for the beautiful spirit that several courtiers deliver themselves.

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