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Dromo's Den
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[Up] [Dromo's Den] Ronsard Biography RONSARD, Pierre De (1525-85). A leading French poet and literary reformer. He was born Sept. 2, 1525, at La Poissonnière (Vendômois), of which his father Louis de Ronsard was seigneur. Ronsard received his early education at home and at the Collège de Navarre, which he entered in January, 1536. He became page of the Dauphin in August, 1536, a few days before the death of this Prince at Tournon. The young page then became attached to Charles, Duke of Orléans, who transferred him to the service of his sister, Madeleine de France, on her marriage to James V of Scotland, Jan. 1, 1537. Ronsard accompanied Madeleine to her future home and witnessed her death immediately after her arrival at Linlithgow. In the autumn of 1538 Ronsard returned to France, only to go back to Scotland on December 24 following. Once more he directed his way to his native country in the autumn of 1539, and after six months' travel in England he reached Paris in March or April, 1540, when he was advanced by the Duke of Orleans from the condition of page to that of écuyer d'écurie. The following May he accompanied the great Ambassador and humanist Lazare de Baïf on a secret mission to Haguenau, where an assembly had been convoked for the purpose of uniting the Catholics and Protestants. Though the mission of Baïf failed, Ronsard came to know some of the most distinguished humanists of the time. The future poet returned home broken in health, never to undertake another journey to foreign lands. As a result of an illness Ronsard became deaf and was obliged to give up his ambition for a career at court. In 1542 he wrote his first Horatian odes in order to rival the translations of the Psalms by the court poet, Clément Marot (q.v.). In March, 1543, Ronsard was present at the funeral of Guillaume du Bellay at Mans, and immediately afterward received the clerical tonsure. It was there also that he met the secretary of the Bishop of Mans, Jacques Peletier, who advised him not to study the humanities, but to write in French. Peletier also published a poem of Ronsard, the first of the latter's works to be printed, in his Œuvres poétiques in 1547. In 1544 Ronsard entered the home of Lazare de Baïf at Paris, where he began the study of Greek in company with the Ambassador's son, Jean Antoine de Baïf (q.v.) under the direction of the humanist Jean Daurat (q.v.). Three years later Joachim du Bellay (q.v.) joined the two young scholars at the Collège de Coqueret, of which Daurat had become the principal. It was there that the famous Pléiade (q.v.) was formed and that their manifesto, the Défense et illustration de la langue française, which inaugurated the classic reform, was written and published in 1549. After publishing some minor pieces Ronsard issued his first collection of poems, the Odes. This was followed by the Amours de Cassandra (1552) , the popularity of which aroused the hostility of the court poet Mellin de Saint-Gelais (q.v.). A few years later came the Hymnes (1555, 1556) , and in 1560 the poet issued the first. edition of his complete works in four volumes. The Elégies, mascarades, et bergeries appeared in 1565, as well as the Abrégé de l’art poétique, in which the poetic theories of the new school were laid down in definite form. In the religious wars Ronsard was a partisan of Catholicism, arousing thereby the hostility of the Huguenots (q.v.) who set up as his rival his famous disciple Du Bartas (q.v.). Charles IX made Ronsard his court poet and suggested the composition of the Franciade (1572), an unfinished epic. Thereafter Ronsard spent his time principally in altering his earlier works and writing occasional poems. His last years were passed in lettered ease at his priories of Croix-Val and Saint-Cosme, at which latter place, near Tours, he died in December, 1585, after having made a final collection of his works (1584) . Ronsard was called the prince of poets by his contemporaries. He received costly gifts from Queen Elizabeth of England and from her prisoner, Mary Queen of Scots, and was visited by Tasso, who consulted him on the Gerusalemme. Ronsard was a master in poetic imagination and in the technique of language and metre. He was most successful in his amatory poems, though he will also rank among the leading poets of France in his love for nature. He was among the first to popularize the sonnet and restored the Alexandrine line to due honor. His lyrics have the naïveté of the Renaissance, a free, healthy naturalism, in which there is hardly a morbid strain. Ronsard, scorned by Boileau (q.v.) and the eighteenth century, has regained appreciation, thanks to the Romantic poets and critics of the nineteenth century. Ronsard's works were printed seventeen times before 1630, and have since been well edited by Blanchemain (8 vols., Paris, 1857-67) , Marty-Laveaux (6 vols., ib., 1887-98), and Pifteau. ib., 1891). A critical edition of his works has been announced by Laumonier for the Société des Textes Modernes, two volumes appearing in 1914. H. Vaganay issued the first two volumes of his edition of Ronsard's complete works (Strassburg, 1913). His biography was first written by Binet in 1586, critically edited by Evers (Philadelphia, 1905) and Laumonier (Paris, 1910). Good critical estimates of Ronsard are Laumonier, Ronsard, poète lyriqace (ib., 1909) , and Jusserand, Ronsard (ib., 1913) . Other critical and biographical studies of importance are: Mellerio, Lexique de Ronsard (ib., 1895); Faguet, Seizième siecle (ib., 1894); Pièri, Pètrarque et Ronsard (Marseilles, 1895); Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, vol. xii; C. H. Page, Songs and Sonnets of Pierre de Ronsard (Boston, 1903). The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XX (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 137. |