In his verse comedy Clymène (published in 1671), La Fontaine (1621–95) portrays a Mount Parnassus plagued by boredom: Apollo deplores that no one knows how to compose good love poems anymore, while the Muse Urania bluntly announces the death of poetry, a divine language that has fallen into the hands of rhymesters. Reflecting a satirical commonplace, this scene nonetheless has symptomatic value in the age of Classicism insofar as it manifests the feeling that the Orphic poetry which was the dream of the Renaissance has been lost.
La Fontaine's Avertissement to his Songe de Vaux (1671) similarly diagnoses the rapid degradation of the grand genres during the decade that has passed since Fouquet commissioned the work: ‘lyric and heroic poetry … are no longer in vogue now as they were then’. But at the same time Clymène proves by example the abundance and variety of poetic genres and forms, illustrating the subject assigned by Apollo with an eclogue, a ballad, a dizain, and a verse narrative.
Likewise, Boileau (1636–1711) devotes the second canto of his Art poétique (1674), which imitates Horace, to a catalogue of the lyric genres of the time, including some minor ones, thus documenting the diversity of the forms, both fixed and open, which poets have at their disposal to address all kinds of subjects in a wide range of tones.