Bouts-Rimés

Bouts-rimés is a French poetic game in which a poet must compose a poem to a given list of rhyming words, preserving their order. The invention is attributed to the minor 17th-century French poet Dulot, who around 1648 claimed to have been robbed of three hundred blank sonnets—sonnets for which he had written only the rhymes. The idea was taken up as a jest and became fashionable. Jean François Sarrazin composed a satire against them in 1654, yet they remained popular in France through the 17th and much of the 18th century. The Academy of Toulouse held an annual contest of 14-line poems in honor of King Louis XIV, awarding a medal to the winning sonnet. In 1864, Alexandre Dumas the elder sponsored a public bout-rimés exercise, inviting all French poets to compose to rhymes selected by Joseph Méry; 350 writers responded, and Dumas published the results in 1865.