Pierre de Ronsard

• 1. Introduction

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  Pierre de Ronsard was born on the 11th of September 1524 at the Manoir de la Possonnière, a country estate in the village of Couture-sur-Loir, in the Vendômois region of France. His father, Louis de Ronsard, served King Francis I as maître d'hôtel du roi, a position of considerable courtly prestige. That royal connection would place the young Pierre at the edge of power from an early age. But it was a private misfortune, not any courtly favor, that would define his life's direction: a sudden onset of deafness, contracted during a diplomatic journey in 1540, ended his career as an ambassador's aide and sent him into years of intensive study. What emerged from those years was something France had not quite seen before. Ronsard became the acknowledged leader of La Pléiade, a group of seven French Renaissance poets who set out to transform their own language by holding it up to the standards of ancient Greek and Latin literature. He was feted by three successive kings, corresponded with Mary, Queen of Scots, and received gifts from Elizabeth I of England. He was also, at various points, denounced as a libertine, an atheist, and a minion of the court. The questions worth asking about Ronsard are not simply how he rose, but how his reputation fell so completely after his death, and how it was eventually recovered.

• 2. A Courtier's Son

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  Louis de Ronsard left home shortly after Pierre was born, called away to attend Francis I, whose captivity following the Battle of Pavia had just been resolved by treaty. Pierre, the youngest son, spent his earliest years at the family manor before being sent to the Collège de Navarre in Paris at the age of nine. When Madeleine of France married James V of Scotland, the young Ronsard became a page in the Scottish court. It was there, in Edinburgh, that he first felt the pull of classical literature and grew inspired to render French vernacular translations of ancient authors. A year after the queen's death, he made his way back to France, travelling through England. Further diplomatic postings followed: to Flanders, to Holland, and again briefly to Scotland, this time in the company of Claude d'Humières, seigneur de Lassigny. He then joined the suite of Lazare de Baïf at the diet of Speyer, and subsequently attached himself to the entourage of the cardinal du Bellay-Langey. It was during this period that he had a notorious quarrel with François Rabelais, the one flash of drama from these otherwise largely administrative years. Then, during a legation to Alsace in 1540, came the attack of deafness that no physician could cure, and with it, the end of his life as a diplomat.

• 3. Seven Years at Coqueret

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  The Collège Coqueret in Paris was run by a scholar named Jean Daurat, who would later be described, with pointed irony, as the "dark star" of the Pléiade, silent in the French tongue because he preferred to write in Latin. Daurat was already known to Ronsard, having served as tutor in the Baïf household. When Ronsard chose Coqueret as the place to devote himself to study, Antoine de Baïf came with him. Remy Belleau followed shortly after, and then Joachim du Bellay. Also studying there was Muretus, known formally as Marc Antoine de Muret, whose Latin plays made him a significant force in the creation of French tragedy. Ronsard spent seven years at the college. The first manifesto of what the group was trying to achieve did not come from him but from Du Bellay, whose Défense et illustration de la langue française appeared in 1549. That text launched the Pléiade, which was first called the Brigade, and its membership was settled as seven writers: Ronsard, Du Bellay, Baïf, Belleau, Pontus de Tyard, the dramatist Jodelle, and Daurat. Ronsard's own poetry came a little later, preceded only by a few minor pieces. One account, perhaps apocryphal, says that a trick played by Du Bellay finally pushed him to publish. The four first books of his Odes appeared in 1550.

• 4. Love, Patrons, and Quarrels

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  In 1552, Ronsard published his Amours de Cassandre alongside the fifth book of Odes. The collection was dedicated to Cassandre Salviati, who was fifteen years old when he met her at Blois and followed her to her father's Château de Talcy. The publication ignited a fierce literary dispute. The followers of the earlier poet Marot, himself now dead, read the Pléiade's contempt for purely vernacular and medieval forms as a direct insult to their tradition. Despite the controversy, Ronsard's rise was rapid and his fortunes unbroken. He published his Hymns, dedicated to Margaret de Valois, in 1555, and his collected Oeuvres in 1560, a project said to have been produced at the invitation of Mary Stuart, then Queen of Francis II of France. The king who would become his most ardent patron, however, was Charles IX, who gave Ronsard rooms in the palace, bestowed abbacies and priories on him, and called him his master in poetry. This royal favor came at a cost. The Huguenots, who had their own poet of real ability in Du Bartas, waged a campaign against Ronsard in print, tried to paint him as a libertine and an atheist by exaggerating the Dionysiac festival at Arcueil, and attempted to elevate Du Bartas as his rival. Ronsard later claimed, in his own words, that they even tried to have him assassinated.

• 5. The Franciade and Its Timing

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  Ronsard had long harbored ambitions for an epic poem in the classical mode. The Franciade, begun during the reign of Charles IX and published in 1572, was intended to be that work. It was never finished, and nearly everyone who has read it has judged it a failure. The problem, at its core, was metrical. Ronsard chose a decasyllabic metre of rimes plates, and that choice sat badly with the grandeur epic poetry demands. Du Bartas and Agrippa d'Aubigné were already producing work in the magnificent alexandrine, and the contrast was hard to miss. Beyond the metre, the poem's overall plan was seen as weakly classical, and its language lacked the particular mixture of scholarly allusion and love of natural beauty that marked the Pléiade's best writing. What sealed its fate, however, was sheer bad timing. The Franciade appeared just about a fortnight after the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, and in that poisoned political climate it had almost no chance. One faction in France was bound to look coldly on anything produced by a favorite of the court; the other had far more urgent things to consider. Ronsard would spend his remaining years in easier domestic circumstances, living between Vendôme, his abbey at Croix-Val, and Paris, where he was often the guest of the scholar Jean Galland at the Collège de Boncourt.

• 6. Reputation Lost and Recovered

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  After Ronsard died at the priory of Saint-Cosme in Touraine on the 27th of December 1585, the literary world wasted little time in turning on him. The classical reaction that followed his death was led by Malherbe, who apparently harbored something like a personal hatred of Ronsard, though the two men seem never to have actually met. Then came Corneille and the broader literary flowering of the seventeenth century, which left the uneven work of the Pléiade looking tentative by comparison. Boileau, who functioned as the de facto dictator of French critical taste in the second half of that century, attacked the Pléiade directly. For the whole of the eighteenth century and into the early nineteenth, Ronsard was largely forgotten, and when he was remembered at all it was usually with contempt. A few readers kept faith: Jean de La Bruyère and Fénelon among them. The Romantic revival of the nineteenth century then adopted Ronsard as a kind of symbolic victim of Boileau's critical tyranny, and in correcting the neglect it perhaps overcorrected, exaggerating his merits in turn. It was left to Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, in his Tableau de la littérature française au 16ème siècle, to place Ronsard on a stable footing, and later critics built on that foundation. Sainte-Beuve's work pointed to what made Ronsard genuinely distinctive: his magnificent handling of language and imagery, and the graceful variety of his metre. Tasso had consulted him on the Gerusalemme while he was alive, and Mary, Queen of Scots had written to him from her prison. Those facts did not go away when Boileau sneered.

• 7. The Poetry Itself

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  Ronsard was the most prolific of all the Pléiade poets. His odes began in close imitation of the strophic forms of ancient verse, but he quickly made a practical decision: rather than preserve the exact quantitative metre of classical poetry, he adjusted the Horatian ode to work within rhyme. The rhythms he devised in that mode were exquisitely melodious, and the secret of how to produce them largely died with the seventeenth century. His amatory verse is where most critics have found him at his best. The long series of sonnets and odes addressed to Cassandre, to Marie, to Genévre, and to Hélène de Surgères, who was described by Ronsard himself as a mainly "literary" love, form the core of his achievement. His descriptions of the natural world belong to this category too: pieces like the "Ode à Cassandre," the "Fontaine Bellerie," and the "Forêt de Gastine" were admired for their grace and freshness. He was also a deliberate stylist at the level of individual words. He favored the graceful diminutives his school placed in fashion, and he used with evident pleasure the gorgeous coined adjectives that the Pléiade celebrated: words like "marbrine," "cinabrine," and "ivoirine." His weaker work was a product of sheer volume; the occasional poetry, epistles, eclogues, and elegies suffer from the quantity in which they were produced. But his 1565 Abrégé de l'art poétique français, a statement of his critical thinking, remained the most important single document of his mature views on what French poetry should do and why.