The Poetry of Ronsard by Pierre de Ronsard
"The Poetry of Ronsard" refers to the works of Pierre de Ronsard, a prominent French poet of the Renaissance, often hailed as the "prince of poets." His poetry reflects the complexities of his time, marked by a blend of nationalism, courtly life, and the cultural shifts characteristic of the Renaissance. Ronsard's works engage deeply with both personal experiences and broader social themes, such as the moral challenges faced by rulers and the beauty of rural life. His poetry is notable for its classical influences and rich imagery, often drawing on references from ancient literature and blending them with his contemporary experiences and landscapes.
Ronsard wrote extensively, producing collections like "ODES," "HYMNS," and "ELEGIES," as well as sonnets dedicated to his mistresses, which express passionate emotions intertwined with classical allusions. Despite encountering criticism, especially from later literary figures who favored more restrained styles, Ronsard's vivid expression and personal voice have garnered renewed appreciation. His ability to capture both the fervor of romance and the subtleties of court life illustrates the enduring appeal of his poetry, making him a central figure in French literary history.
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The Poetry of Ronsard by Pierre de Ronsard
First published:Odes, Books I-IV, 1550; Book V, 1552; Amours de Cassandre, 1552; Hymns, 1555; Elegies, mascarades et bergeries, 1565; La Franciade, 1572
Type of work: Poetry
Critical Evaluation:
Pierre de Ronsard was in his own time, and to a less degree in later times as well, the “prince of poets.” This was not merely an impression generally held. It was Ronsard’s own conviction, and he did not hesitate to admonish a coy mistress by reminding her that her kindness to him was as nothing to his generosity in fixing her name in the midst of immortal lines. But the arrogance can, though infrequently, coincide with just estimate; Ronsard, the kings of France whom he served, and those enemies, Mary Stuart and Elizabeth of England, were at one in their estimate of his verses.
Some poets speak at variance with the conditions of their lives and their own time. Ronsard, however final and universal his accent, always speaks to us of his own era and the circumstances of his life. Great and moving as his poems are, they speak of Renaissance spirit as well as of humanity pure and simple.
The Renaissance, in France as elsewhere, was a time when several tendencies, not necessarily compatible, merged with each other. It was a time when nationalism was taking the place of the feudal loyalties that had once held society loosely together. At the center of Ronsard’s political consciousness are the king and his court: from the king flow the favors, including ecclesiastical benefices, which allow a poet to live, and the king’s court, the nobility that dine, talk, and dance there day after day, constitutes the audience for whom the poet writes. Ronsard addressed not a general public but a particular one in that it was small and self-conscious in its tastes. It expected a poet to be learned as well as moving, and it accepted and understood references to events known only to the privileged.
Related to this rarefied centrality is the growing patriotism that led Ronsard’s friend Du Bellay, also a member of the literary group called the Pleiade to which Ronsard belonged, to write La defense et illustration de la langue Francaise (1549), in which the tendency of the learned to write Latin verse is censured and, perhaps inconsistently, the importance of classical studies to any French-writing poet is underlined. The result was that Ronsard’s use of his mother tongue reflected literary conventions as old as Homer, Sappho, Theocritus, and Horace. Nymphs haunt Ronsard’s home forest of Gastine; local fountains, like that of Ballerie, have all the grace and romantic significance of the ancient Arethusa; and the real charms of Ronsard’s various mistresses—Cassandre, Marie, Astree, Helene—receive additions from what Catullus, many centuries before, wrote about his Lesbia.
Like numerous other Renaissance persons, Ronsard was a full-blooded man as well as a literary person. He did not, for example, escape the serious political turmoil of the century which divided Catholic France against Protestant France and, of course, one part of the court against another. Though he could mingle Christian and Greek views of deity in the same poem, Ronsard died enjoying the full rites of the Church, and he earlier lived perceptive of the superior advantages, to a cultured man, of the rich traditions of the Catholic Church as opposed to the stern moralism, the “Hebraism” of many of the “sectaries.” Because of his adherence to the Catholic faith, Protestant writers attacked the poet, not for his advocacy of pleasant and amorous pursuit alone, but for darker sins which had once been a part of the pagan world.
The pattern of Ronsard’s personal career but intensifies the lines drawn in his world. He was wellborn and demandingly educated; he served at court; he went twice to Scotland and once to England and Germany. Suffering from early deafness, he subsided into the role of court poet; he received the tonsure in order to enjoy ecclesiastical benefices; and the rest of his long life was an alternation between the court and his three country estates. His background provided Ronsard with two of his main themes: the peril and hypocrisy of courts and the charm and natural beauty of a life that is rural and retired. (This contention between city and country finds reflection in the essays of Ronsard’s great contemporary, Montaigne.) A poem like “Institution pour l’Adolescence du Roy tres-crestien Charles IX de ce Nom” is a stern, moving record of Ronsard’s estimates of the moral perils that threaten a king, and “A la Forest de Gastine” is an account of Ronsard’s country pleasures which mingles classical memories with vivid recollections of the real forest, greensward, and flowers.
Testimony to a rich, energetic life that was both patriotic and passionate echoes through Ronsard’s poetry; friendship and piety, playful wit and sober reflection mingle in such collections as ODES, HYMNS, BOCAGE ROYALE, and ELEGIES. His one real poetic disaster is the FRANCIADE, an epic written at royal command, beginning with the tale of Troy and ending with the history of the Merovingian kings of early France.
No summary of Ronsard’s poetic creation can omit the many sonnets which he wrote to his mistresses—some kind, some cruel. Here, too, recollections of Petrarch’s Laura shape the diction of many a passionate declaration. But Ronsard, unlike many Elizabethan sonneteers in the last decades of the century, was always in pursuit of a flesh and blood woman rather than the “Idea” of Drayton. Passion was the occasion for extended poetic exercises, but the exercises were never, with Ronsard, an adequate substitute for passion gratified. Two of his mistresses, one early, one late, were cruel—Cassandre Salviati, who disappointed the young Ronsard by marrying; and Helene de Surgeres, who during several years never submitted to Ronsard’s passion, dressed in black, and was painfully faithful to the shade of a dead sweetheart and the rites of amorous Platonism. It is to these two women rather than to more indulgent mistresses that his greatest sonnets are addressed. In one Ronsard declares to his servant that he wishes to shut himself up and read the ILIAD of Homer in three days, unless a message comes from Cassandre. In another the name Helene suggests to aging Ronsard some moving parallels with Homer’s heroine; he adds, hopefully, that he believes his Helene may also turn out to be a Penelope, a comfort as well as a torment. Or, anticipating Shakespearian accents (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day . . .”) Ronsard writes of Helene’s chill perfection: “Shall I compare your beauties to the moon. . . .”
Ronsard’s abundance, his revival of certain parts of the medieval French vocabulary, his personal note—all these were censured by Malherbe, the taste-maker of the next century. Ronsard was also too direct for the oversubtle precieuses, the finicking, “learned” women of the Hotel de Rambouillet. These seventeenth-century women, ironically, had a good deal in common with Ronsard’s Helene. But an eclipse of several centuries is now over, and Ronsard’s poetic fame has now revived.