Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585)

Portrait de RonsardPortrait de Ronsard (Les Amours, 1552)


Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585) was born at the Château de la Poissonniere, in the province of Vendomois, to a noble family. Educated at the Collège de Navarre in Paris from age nine, Ronsard spent three years in England attached to the king’s service as a page following the marriage of Madeleine de France to James V of Scotland. When he returned to France in 1540, he joined the service of the Duke of Orléans, then became a secretary to Lazare de Baïf, the father of his future fellow-poet in the Pléiade, Antoine de Baïf. His apparently promising diplomatic career was cut short by a sudden and incurable deafness. Ronsard devoted himself to study at the Collège de Coqueret, where the principal, Jean Dorat, taught Greek and Latin and introduced Ronsard to a high vision of literature and humanism. Dorat’s pupil Antoine de Baïf accompanied Ronsard, and was soon followed by Belleau and Joachim du Bellay, who was to produce in 1549 the Défense et illustration de la langue française, widely considered the founding gesture of the Pléiade movement.
Ronsard’s first major literary work came with the publication of the Quatre premiers livres des Odes in 1550, where he attempted to revive ancient lyric poetry in the form of Pindaric and Horatian odes. This somewhat bombastic gesture drew sharp criticism and the mockery of court poet Saint-Gelais. The ensuing polemics opposed a young generation of ambitious poets led by Du Bellay and Ronsard who aspired to imitate and rival with classical and Italian poetry, and the admirers of Marot, Saint-Gelais and a more traditional canon of French poetry. Ronsard’s next literary achievement, the Amours (1552), brought him this time fame and popular success: he reconciled soon after with Saint-Gelais and became the leading court poet. Though undoubtedly marked by Petrarchan influences, this love sonnet sequence dedicated to Cassandre displays Ronsard’s unique talent and hedonist inspiration. The rhetorical and imagistic patterns inherited from the Italian poet (the emotional landscape of piercing arrows, filters and poisons) are detached in the Amours from their context of mystical adoration, and instead imbued with a vivid sensuality that significantly alters their reading. The frequent references to metamorphosis in the Amours speak to the quality of the poet’s own desires: he portrays himself transformed as a bouquet in the hand of the beloved, the water in her bath, the rain of gold upon her breast, a flea kising her skin, granting him a taste of the voluptuousness is unfulfilled desires aspire to.
Enjoying an immediate and overwhelming popularity, Ronsard went on to publish his Hymnes, dedicated to Marguerite de Valois, in 1555, the Continuation des Amours and Nouvelle Continuation des Amours dedicated this time to Marie in 1555-1556. He collected his Oeuvres as early as 1560, and was to polish and rearrange them continuously until his death.
Extraordinarily well-known and respected during his lifetime, he was honored with gifts from Queen Elizabeth, and consulted by Tasso on the Gerusalemme. His work was not universally admired, however; during his lifetime he faced opposition by both the followers of Marot, who found his outspoken contempt of merely vernacular and medieval forms and his insistence that French poets “follow the ancients” an insult to the earlier poets, and the Huguenot faction antagonized by his strong connections to the royal family and the catholic party.

© Emily Dalton and Cécile Alduy.


Selective Bibliography:

Works by Ronsard:

“Hymne de la France” (1549)
“Ode a la Paix” (1549)
Les quatre premiers Livres des Odes de Pierre de Ronsard, Vandomois (1550)
Les Amours de Pierre de Ronsard, Vandomoys [Amours de Cassandre] (1552)
Hymnes (1555)
Continuation des Amours [Amours de Marie] (1555) ; Nouvelle Continuation des Amours (1556)
Elégies, mascarades et bergeries (1565)
Les Œuvres de P. de Ronsard gentilhomme Vandomois (1560; 1578, 1589…)
Quatre premiers livres de la Franciade (1572)
Sonnets pour Hélène (1578)
RONSARD, Pierre de, Œuvres complètes, édition critique par P. Laumonier, réed. par I. Silver et R. Lebègue, Paris, Hachette, S.T.F.M., 1914-1975, 20 tomes.
Critical Works:
CAVE, Terence, The Cornucopian Text. Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1985.
DASSONVILLE, Michel, Ronsard. Étude historique et littéraire, Genève, Droz, 1968-1990, 5 vol.
KRITZMAN, Lawrence D., The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French Renaissance, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991.
MÉNAGER, Daniel, Ronsard: le roi, le poète et les hommes, Genève, Droz,1979.
PY, Albert, Imitation et Renaissance dans la poésie de Ronsard, Genève, Droz, 1984.
RIGOLOT, François, Poésie et Renaissance, Paris, Seuil, “Point Essai”, 2003.
Ronsard en son IVe centenaire. actes du colloque international Pierre de Ronsard (Paris-Tours, septembre 1985), éd. Y. Bellenger, J. Céard, D. Ménager et M. Simonin, Genève, Droz, 1988-1989.
Ronsard in Cambridge, proceedings of the Cambridge Ronsard Colloquium, 10-12 April 1985, éd. par Philip Ford et Gillian Jondorf avec une introduction de Dorothy Gabe Coleman, Cambridge, Cambridge French Colloquia, 1986
ROUGET, François, Pierre de Ronsard, Roma, Memini, Bibliothèque des Écrivains français, 2006.
STURM-Maddox, Sara, Ronsard, Petrarch, and the “Amours”, Gainesville, University Press of Florida, 1999.

Online resources:
Encyclopedia Britanica (1919)

Students' Highlights:

"Ronsard conceived of the poet as a recipient of the divine inspiration of the Muses without which no amount of study could fashion a poet out of an ordinary mortal. For Ronsard, this inspiration was accompanied by a moral obligation to hold one’s poetic gifts as sacred and to channel them toward appropriately worthy matters. His lofty vision of the poetic mission stood in contrast to the conception of the poetic creation as craft or as a mere branch of rhetoric, that had prevailed in France in the years prior to the Pléiade. Like many of his fellow sixteenth century poets, Ronsard saw his art as mimetic: he believed his task was to imitate nature, to articulate the truths of particular objects, and to place these truths in relation to larger universal truths. Indeed, in his preface to the 1550 Odes he announces: “I am of the opinion that no Poetry should be held praiseworthy or finished unless it represents nature, which was esteemed beautiful by the ancients only because it was inconstant and variable in its perfections.” It is in part his determination to portray Nature’s varies abundance that underlies the dazzling variety of style and form that marks his literary production." (Emily Dalton)