HUMANITIES INSTITUTE FRENCH POETRY – 16th Century Buckner B Trawick, Ph.D. Updated By Frederic Will

The Pleiad

In the middle of the sixteenth century, when Italian and humanistic influencewas at its height, a group of young poets, led by Pierre de Ronsard,launched a movement for the improvement of the French language and French literature. The manifesto of their views, The Defense and Glorification of the French Language (La Défense et Illustration de lalangue française, 1549),written by Joachim du Bellay (below), is in two parts. The first part scoffsat those who insist on employing Latin for serious writing and defends French as a suitable language for literary and philosophical composition. The second part aims at improving the vernacular tongue, and the best way, it proclaims, is to read and imitate the ancients, especially Homer, Virgil, and Horace. It suggests abandoning medieval liter-ary forms (e.g., the rondeau and the ballade) and returning to the ancient ones (e.g., the epic and the ode). This part of the manifesto urges also following the style of the old classics.

The young poets who espoused and put into practice these views were known as the Pleiad (La Pléiade).* Its members were Pierre de Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay, Ponthus de Thyard, Etienne Jodelle, Remi Belleau, Antoine de Baif, and Jean Dorat.**

Although the Pleiad have been accused of blind adoration of the classics — even of the inferior works of the ancients — of bookishness, of allowing erudition to smother some poems, and of lack of self-restraint, the literature of France is indebted to them for several great achievements. They succeeded in ennobling and elevating the language, they exalted poetry and the poet’s mission, they popularized the sonnet in France, and they laid the foundation for the classical literature of the seventeenth century.

PIERRE DE RONSARD(1524-1585). Ronsard, “Prince of Poets,” was bom at the Chateau de la Poissonniere near Vendome. After studying a short while at the College de Navarre in Paris, he became a page, first to the Duc d’Orleans and later to Madeleine de France, whom he accompanied to Scotland when she married James V. He remained in Scotland about two years and in England about six months. After returning to France, he accompanied several noblemen on diplomatic missions and seemed destined himself to become a diplomat, when he was stricken with deafness. Thereupon he took holy orders, but soon devoted most of his energies to the study of Latin and Greek. Along with An-toine de Baif he studied for aboutsix years under the great humanist Jean Dorat —part of the time at, the College de Coqueret, where he knew du Bellay, Jodelle, and Belleau. After 1550 he divided his time between Paris and Touraine. He was always a great favorite of the monarchs — Henry II, Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III.

Works. As leader of the Pleiad, Ronsard took as his model the Greek and Latin epic and lyric poets and Petrarch. Versatile and prolific, he wrote poetry of almost every sort except dramatic. His works may be divided into three distinct periods: (1) from 1550 to 1560, “the innovating epoch of Hellenistic and Petrarchian imitation” ;1 (2) from 1560 to 1574, when he “is the official court poet . . . the poète oratoire. . . .” ;2 and (3) from 1574 to 1584, the period of his tranquil retirement, when he writes some calm poetry about nature and love.

His most important works are as follows: ODES (Books I-IV, 1550; Book V, 1552). On the whole, unsuccessful imitations of Pindar. “In trying to reproduce the sentiment and sing the modern equivalents of the old demi-gods and heroes, Ronsard crammed his poems with historical and mythological allusions, resulting in a noble but quite superfluous disorder. . . ,”3 The Odes were, nevertheless, popular in Ronsard’s own day.

LOVE POETRY. Ronsard’s love poetry often is filled with a mild melancholy — a wistful regret that beauty is so short-lived and that life itself is so short. He wrote several groups of love poems:

Loves of Cassandra (Amours de Cassandre or Amours de P. Ronsard, 1552). A collection of 181 sonnets, addressed to Cassandre Salviati of Blois. These show some influence of Horace, but are chiefly Petrarchistic.*** They generally lack originality but have some exquisite lines. Along with the Loves of Mariethey established Ronsard’s fame and won for him the unofficial title of “Prince des poètes français.”

Loves of Marie (Amours de Marie or Continuation des Amours, 1555- 1556). These are indebted to Anacreon, Theocritus, and Petrarch. They are addressed to Marie Dupin, a village girl of Anjou, and, like Petrarch’s sonnets to Laura, celebrate the beloved before and after her death. They are somewhat deeper in feeling than the Loves of Cassandra, but still rather shallow.

Sonnets for Helen (Sonnets pour Helenec.1574-1584). A series of sonnets to Helene de Surgeres, the maid of honor to Catherine de’Medici. The poems are among Ronsard’s more original, personal, and sincere work.

POLITICAL POETRY. During the first of the civil wars of religion (1562-1563), Ronsard wrote (in alexandrines) three “Discourses” in support of the Catholics: Discourse on the Miseries of the, Times (Discours des miseres de ce temps), Continuation of the Discourse (Continuation du discours), and Remonstrance to the People of France (Remontrance au peuple de France). Here he discards mythology and speaks sincerely, powerfully, and sometimes ironically.

AN EPIC:THE FRANCIADE (1372), “A dull epic.”4 Ronsard wrote only four of the pro-posed twenty-four books of an epic which was intended to relate the origins of the French people. His models were Homer and Virgil; his principal source was the Illustraitionsof the Gauls and Singularities of Troy,by the minor poet Jehan. Lemaire de Belges (1473-1525), The Franciadewas a complete failure, because it was artificial and lacked “an unquestioning feeling of human destiny to guide it.”5

Evaluation. Ronsard’s greatest faults are prolixity and an eruditeness which often leans toward pedantry. His merits are versatility, liveliness, skill in rhythm and meter (later French poetry is indebted to him for his metrical experiments), and an occasional) gen-uine lyricism. He is poorest in his odes and epic, best in his amorous and political poetry, where he gives vent to his own emotions.

Three of his best known single poems are “Darling, Let’s Go See if the Rose” (“Mignonne, allons voir si la rose”) — an excellent expression of the carpe diemtheme; “When I Have Gone Twenty or Thirty Months” (“Quand je suis vingt ou trente mois”); and “When You Are Very Old” (“Quand vous serez bien vieille” ) —an admirable sonnet to Helene.

JOACHIM DU BELLAY (1525-1560). Next to Ronsard thegreatest of the Pleiad, he was born at Lire in Anjou. After studying law for a short time at Poitiers, he met Jacques Peletier and Ronsard, became a member of the College de Coqueret, and devoted himself to literature. Like Ronsard, he became deaf (1549); and like Rabelais, he went to Rome with Jean du Bellay, his kinsman (1553). He returned to France in 1557 and died there of apoplexy when he was only thirty-five years old.

In addition to his famous Defense and Glorification (above), du Bellay wrote “the first sonnet-sequence in the French language”6 ─ The Olive (L’Olive, 1550), a rather close imitation of Petrarch and Ariosto which contains a considerable amount of Platonic epistemology. The Antiquities of Rome (Les Antiquites de Rome, 1558)7 celebrates the former glories of the Eternal City; and The Regrets (Les Regrets) satirizes and laments the contemporary corruption of Rome.

* The name was borrowed from a group of Alexandrian poets of the third century B.C., among whose members was Theocritus. This earlier group had, of course, taken its name from the constellation.

**Various authorities list different members. All, however, agree on the first four named. Other poets thought by some historians to have been members are Peletier, Des Autels, and La Péruse.

***“The characteristics of Petrarchism were: Forced metaphor and similes running into each other, so that often the original subject of interest was quite lost to view; constant allegory, not of personified qualities as in the Middle Ages, but of hearts driven to and fro like barks in distress ; over-indulgence in mythological allusions, so that the explanations of commentators seemed often necessary; repeated antitheses and, later, pointes; laments of the unhappy lover and complaints about the cruel coquette who makes him suffer agony so long that he seems to take joy in his woe ; elaborate and sensuous descriptions of the beauty adored” (Wright, pp. 104-195).

1 Nitze and Dargan, p. 179. 2 Nitze and Dargan, p. 179. 3 C. H. C. Wright, .A History of French Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1925) p. 191. 4 George Saintsbury, A Short History of French Literature, 5th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), p. 172. 5 Nitze and Dargan, p. 183. 6 Butler, I, 137. 7 Translated by Spenser with the title The Ruines of Rome.

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