Pierre de Ronsard

Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585), the leading poet of the French Renaissance. Ronsard was born near Vendồme and trained as a royal page, and then a squire, but became deaf and turned to books. In 1544 he went to Paris, where he studied with the French Classicist Jean Dorat at the Collège de Coqueret. At this time Ronsard and others formed the Pléiade, a group of writers dedicated to a complete renewal of French poetry inspired by the achievements of the Italian Renaissance. Ronsard followed the example of the Italians in taking the Classical poets for models in his first published work, the Odes (1550-1552), modelled after the erudite and complex odes of the Greek poet Pindar, and the lighter, simpler odes of the Roman poet Horace. Into these, as in his Hymnes (1555-1556), as well as in a number of elegies dispersed among the collections of his poems published during his lifetime, Ronsard infused his own personality, notably his sensitivity to nature, and his belief in the importance of the poetic vocation. He was court poet to Charles IX on the outbreak of the religious civil wars between Catholics and Huguenots (French Protestants) and defended the Catholic cause both in person and in polemical poems, notably the Discours sur les Misères de ce Temps (Discourse on the Wretchedness of the Present Times, 1562), and the Remontrance au Peuple de France (Admonition of the French People, 1563). Ronsard published in 1572 four books of an unfinished epic La Franciade (The Epic of France) about the mythical origins of the French nation.

Ronsard’s lasting reputation rests largely on his love poetry, much of it freely based on themes from Classical antiquity, but influenced above all by the Italian poet Petrarch. His first collection, the Amours de Cassandre (1552), was derivative in both style and content. The Cassandre to whom it is addressed is an imaginary figure based on Petrarch’s Laura. The Continuation des Amours (1555) employed a touching “middle style” to celebrate the poet’s idealized love for a country girl, Marie de Bourgueil. Ronsard’s masterpiece is the Sonnets pour Hélène (Sonnets for Helen, 1578), where the theme of an old man’s unrequited love for a younger woman was directly inspired by Ronsard’s own love for Hélène de Surgères. The collection includes the famous “Quand Vous Serez Bien Vieille, le Soir, à la Chandelle”, memorably paraphrased by The Irish poet W. B. Yeats (“When You are Old and Grey and Full of Sleep”), and displays Ronsard’s flexible mastery of the 12-syllable line known as the alexandrine, which had fallen out of use since the Middle Ages, but was to become the standard metre (see Versification) for serious poetry in French from the 17th century onward.