The Poet and the KingThe Poet and the King, described by the New York Review of Books as the finest and most perceptive of all the innumerable accounts of La Fontaine, is being offered for the first time in an English translation. La Fontaine, whose works are still memorized by French schoolchildren, is regarded by Fumaroli, and countless others, as the greatest French lyric poet of the seventeenth century. La Fontaine is best known, however, for his fables and Contes.