RONSARD, PIERRE de. — French poet, born at the château of La Poissonnière (Vendôme) on 11 September 1525, died on 27 December 1585 at the priory of St-Cosme-sur-Loire.
Of noble family, he was soon, together with his father, attached to the retinue of Francis I, and spent his adolescence at court as a page to the royal princes. Struck by deafness in 1540, he had to abandon the military career that was opening before him; he then turned to the study of literature, which he had already cultivated during his years at court, writing verses in French and Latin. In 1543 he received the tonsure and obtained several ecclesiastical benefices. He formed close friendships with several fellow students, such as Jean-Antoine de Baif, Jodelle, Pontus de Thyard, and, finally, Joachim du Bellay; together with their common teacher Jean Daurat, in 1549 he constituted the nucleus of the Pléiade, the poetic school that dominated the French Renaissance, of which he was the principal exponent. Indeed, with his collaboration, in that same year Joachim du Bellay published the Défense et illustration de la langue française, the program of the new school, which sought to rehabilitate the national language in the literary sphere, including its dialectal forms, in opposition to the Italianisms and Latinisms then in vogue. This school, which enjoyed great success at its inception, rapidly declined in the following century in the face of Malherbe (v.) had made himself the herald.
In 1550 R. published Les Quatres premiers livres des Odes (the fifth in 1552); then, in 1552, the first book of the Amours, a series of Petrarchan sonnets in honor of “Cassandre,” followed in 1560 by the Second livre des Amours for Marie du Pin and, later, in 1578, by the Sonnets pour Hélène. During those same years he published various Bocages, Mélanges, and Hymnes, a series of Discours, Elégies, and Les quatre premiers livres de la Franciade.
In the Hymnes R. expresses a profound love for his country and his King; he also deeply felt the anguish of the religious struggles tearing France apart, and repeatedly accused the Protestants of fomenting discord in the country. For their part, the Calvinists reproached him with being a priest, an atheist, and leading a licentious life; there was even a Protestant literary uprising against him.
But in his poems (Poèmes, book II) R. answered his religious enemies by demonstrating that he had never taken Orders, but merely enjoyed the revenues of several abbeys. R. is reputed to have been the greatest poet of his time; subsequent centuries completely ignored him: at least in France, whereas Scipione Maffei praised him and Goethe admired him. Only Romanticism rescued him and his school from obscurity: Balzac, Michelet, and above all Sainte-Beuve rehabilitated him, placing him among the great French poets.