Short answers, pulled from the story.
Pierre de Ronsard (the 11th of September 1524 - the 27th of December 1585) was a French Renaissance poet and the acknowledged leader of La Pléiade, a group of seven poets who sought to elevate the French language by applying the critical standards of ancient Greek and Latin literature to vernacular writing. His reputation was established by critics including Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve.
La Pléiade was a group of seven French Renaissance poets who set out to reform French literature by drawing on classical models. Its accepted members were Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay, Antoine de Baïf, Remy Belleau, Pontus de Tyard, the dramatist Jodelle, and Jean Daurat. Du Bellay launched the movement with his Défense et illustration de la langue française in 1549.
Ronsard suffered an attack of deafness during a 1540 legation visit to Alsace that no physician could cure. The hearing impairment ended his prospects as a diplomat and led him to devote himself to seven years of intensive study at the Collège Coqueret in Paris under the scholar Jean Daurat.
The Franciade was an epic poem Ronsard began under Charles IX and published in 1572; it was never completed and is generally considered a failure. Critics faulted its decasyllabic metre of rimes plates, which compared poorly with the alexandrines that poets such as Du Bartas were producing. Its publication also had the misfortune of appearing roughly a fortnight after the massacre of Saint Bartholomew.
Charles IX of France was Ronsard's most devoted royal patron, giving him rooms in the palace, bestowing abbacies and priories on him, and calling him his master in poetry. Ronsard also received presents from Elizabeth I of England, was addressed from prison by Mary, Queen of Scots, and his collected Oeuvres of 1560 was said to have been produced at the invitation of Mary Stuart when she was Queen of Francis II.
After Ronsard died in 1585, the critic Malherbe led a classical reaction against him, and Boileau later attacked the Pléiade directly, leaving Ronsard largely forgotten or ridiculed through the eighteenth century. The Romantic revival of the nineteenth century rehabilitated him as a victim of Boileau's critical tyranny, and Sainte-Beuve's scholarly work in his Tableau de la littérature française au 16ème siècle gave him a lasting critical standing.