 Against the usual tradition of using Classical Chinese, this poetry was composed in the vernacular.In 16th-century Britain, Thomas Campion wrote lute songs and Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare popularized the sonnet.In France, La Pléiade—including Pierre de Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay, and Jean-Antoine de Baïf—aimed to break with earlier traditions of French poetry—particularly Marot and the "grands rhétoriqueurs"—and began imitating classical Greek and Roman forms such as the odes.