Renaissance poet, born in La Possonnière, C France. He trained as a page, but became deaf, and took up writing, studying for seven years at the Collège de Coqueret, and becoming a leader of the Pléiade group. His early works include Odes (1550) and Amours (1552), and he later wrote two bitter reflections on the political and economic state of the country. He was highly successful in his lifetime, but his fame suffered an eclipse after his death until the growth of the Romantic movement in the 19th-c.
Pierre de Ronsard, commonly referred to as Ronsard (September 11, 1524 – December, 1585), was a French poet and "prince of poets" (as his own generation in France called him). He was born at the Manoir de la Possonnière, in the village of Couture-sur-Loir, Loir-et-Cher.
His family is said to have come from the predominantly Romanian provinces to the north of the Danube (provinces with which the Crusades had given France much intercourse) in the first half of the 14th century. Baudouin de Ronsard or Rossart was the founder of the French branch of the house, and made his mark in the early stages of the Hundred Years' War. The poet's father was named Louys de Ronsard, and his mother was Jeanne de Chaudrier, of a family not only noble in itself but well connected. Loys de Ronsard was maître d'hôtel du roi to Francis I, whose captivity after Pavia had just been softened by treaty, and he had to quit his home shortly after Pierre's birth.
The future Prince of Poets was educated at home for some years and sent to the Collège de Navarre in Paris when he was nine years old. When Madeleine of France was married to James V of Scotland, Ronsard was attached to the king's service, and he spent three years in Britain.
In this service he had other opportunities of travel, being sent to Flanders and again to Scotland. After a time a more important employment fell to his lot, and he was attached as secretary to the suite of Lazare de Baïf, the father of his future colleague in the Pléiade and his companion on this occasion, Antoine de Baïf, at the diet of Speyer.
His apparently promising diplomatic career was, however, cut short by an attack of deafness which no physician could cure, and he determined to devote himself to study. The institution which he chose for the purpose among the numerous schools and colleges of Paris was the Collège Coqueret, the principal of which was Daurat--afterwards the "dark star" (as he has been called from his silence in French) of the Pléiade, and already an acquaintance of Ronsard's from his having held the office of tutor in the Baïf household. Antoine de Baïf, Daurat's pupil, accompanied Ronsard; Muretus (Marc Antoine de Muret), a great scholar and by means of his Latin plays a great influence in the creation of French tragedy, was also a student here.
Ronsard's period of study occupied seven years, and the first manifesto of the new literary movement, which was to apply to the vernacular the principles of criticism and scholarship learnt from the classics, came not from him but from Du Bellay. The Defense et illustration de la langue française of the latter appeared in 1549, and the Pléiade (or Brigade, as it was first called) may be said to have been then launched. It consisted, as its name implies, of seven writers whose names are sometimes differently enumerated, though the orthodox canon is beyond doubt composed of Ronsard, Du Bellay, Baïf, Remy Belleau, Pontus de Tyard (a man of rank and position who had exemplified the principles of the friends earlier), Jodelle the dramatist, and Daurat. Ronsard's own work came a little later, and a rather idle story is told of a trick of Du Bellay's which at last determined him to publish. Some single and minor pieces, an epithalamium on Antoine de Bourbon and Jeanne de Navarre (1550), a "Hymne de la France" (1549), an "Ode a la Paix," preceded the publication in 1550 of the four first books ("first" is characteristic and noteworthy) of the Odes of Pierre de Ronsard.
This was followed in 1552 by the publication of his Amours de Cassandre with the fifth book of Odes, dedicated to the 15-year-old Cassandre Salviati, whom he had met at Blois and followed to her father's Château de Talcy. Marot was dead, but be left a numerous school, some of whom saw in the stricter literary critique of the Pléiade, in its outspoken contempt of merely vernacular and medieval forms, in its strenuous advice to French poetry to "follow the ancients," and so forth, an insult to the author of the Adolescence Clémentine and his followers.
His popularity in his own time was overwhelming and immediate, and his prosperity was unbroken. To this same year belongs his most important and interesting Abrégé de l'art poétique français.
The rapid change of sovereigns did Ronsard no harm. It excited violent dislike to Ronsard on the part of the Huguenots, who wrote constant pasquinades against him, strove (by a ridiculous exaggeration of the Dionysiac festival at Arcueil, in which the friends had indulged to celebrate the success of the first French tragedy, Jodelle's Cleopatre) to represent him as a libertine and an atheist, and (which seems to have annoyed him more than anything else) set up his follower Du Bartas as his rival.
| French literature |
|---|
| By category |
| French literary history |
|
Medieval |
| French Writers |
|
Chronological list |
| France Portal |
| Literature Portal This box: view • talk • edit |
According to some words of his own, which are quite credible considering the ways of the time, they were not contented with this variety of argument, but attempted to have him assassinated. During this period Ronsard's work was considerable but mostly occasional, and the one work of magnitude upon which Charles put him, the Franciade (1572), has never been ranked, even by his most devoted admirers, as a chief title to fame.
The death of Charles made, indeed, little difference in the court favour which Ronsard enjoyed, but, combined with his increasing infirmities, it seems to have determined him to quit court life. During his last days he lived chiefly at a house which he possessed in Vendôme, the capital of his native province, at his abbey at Croix-Val in the same neighbourhood, or else at Paris, where he was usually the guest of Jean Galland, well known as a scholar, at the College de Boncourt.
His last years were, however, saddened not merely by the death of many of his most intimate friends, but by constant and increasing ill-health.
The character and fortunes of Ronsard's works are among the most remarkable in literary history, and supply in themselves a kind of illustration of the progress of French literature during the last three centuries. At first, as has been said, the enmity, not altogether unprovoked, of the friends and followers of Marot fell to his lot, then the still fiercer antagonism of the Huguenot faction, who, happening to possess a poet of great merit in Du Bartas, were able to attack Ronsard in his tenderest point. After his death the classical reaction set in under the auspices of Malherbe, who seems to have been animated with a sort of personal hatred of Ronsard, though it is not clear that they ever met. After Malhérbe the rising glory of Corneille and his contemporaries obscured the tentative and unequal work of the Pléiade, which was, moreover, directly attacked by Boileau himself, the dictator of French criticism in the last half of the 17th century.
Then Ronsard was, except by a few men of taste, like Jean de La Bruyère and Fénelon, forgotten when he was not sneered at. The critical work, however, first of Sainte-Beuve in his Tableau de la littérature francaise au 16ème siècle, and since of others, has established Ronsard pretty securely in his right place, a place which may be defined in a few sentences.
Ronsard was the acknowledged chief of the Pléiade and its most voluminous poet.
His odes, which are very numerous, are also very interesting and in their best shape very perfect compositions. Generally speaking, Ronsard is best in his amatory verse (the long series of sonnets and odes to Cassandre, Marie, Genévre, Héléne--Héléne de Surgeres, a later and mainly "literary" love--etc.), and in his descriptions of the country (the famous "Mignonne allons voir si la rose," the "Fontaine Bellerie," the "Forêt de Gastine," and so forth), which have an extraordinary grace and freshness. In short, Ronsard shows eminently the two great attractions of French 16th century poetry as compared with that of the two following ages--magnificence of language and imagery and graceful variety of metre.
Bibliography
The chief separately published works of Ronsard are noted above. The work of Claude Binet in 1586, Discours de la vie de Pierre de Ronsard, is very important for early information, and the author seems to have revised some of Ronsard's work under the poet's own direction.
From 1630 Ronsard was not again reprinted for more than two centuries. There are also selections, Choix de poésies - publiées par A. Noël (in the Collection Didot) and Becq de Fouquières. In 1857 Prosper Blanchemain, who had previously published a volume of Œuvres inédites de Ronsard, undertook a complete edition for the Bibliothéque Elzévirienne, in eight volumes.
As for criticism, Sainte-Beuve followed up his early work by articles in the Causeries du lundi, and later critics have dealt with him.
User Comments Add a comment…