RONSARD, PIERRE de. - French poet, b. at the château de la Poissonnière (Vendôme), 11 Sept. 1525, d. 27 Dec. 1585 at the priory of St-Cosme-sur-Loire.
Of a noble family, he was soon, together with his father, in 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 renounce the military career that was opening before him; and he turned to the study of letters, already cultivated during his years at court, writing verses in French and in Latin. In 1543 he received the tonsure and obtained several ecclesiastical benefices. Having formed a friendship with some fellow students such as Jean-Antoine de Baif, Jodelle, Pontus de Thyard, and, lastly, Joachim du Bellay, together with their common teacher Jean Daurat, in 1549 he formed the nucleus of the Pléiade, the poetic school that dominated the French Renaissance, and of which he was the principal exponent. With his collaboration, in fact, in that same year 1549 Joachim du Bellay published the Défense et illustration de la langue française, the manifesto of the new school which attempted to rehabilitate in the literary field the national language, even in its dialectal forms, against the Italianisms and Latinisms then in vogue. This school, which obtained great success at its formation, declined rapidly in the following century in the face of the new ideas of which Malherbe (v.) had made himself the herald.
In 1550 R. published Les Quatres premiers livres des Odes (the fifth in '52); then, in 1552, the first book of the Amours, a series of Petrarchan sonnets in honor of « Cassandre », which were followed in 1560 by the Second livre des Amours for Marie du Pin, and, later, in 1578, by the Sonnets pour Hélène. In those same years he published various Bocages, Mélanges, Hymnes, a series of Discours, Elégies and Les quatre premiers livres de la Franciade.
In the Hymns R. expresses a profound love of his country and of his King; he also felt deeply the torment of the religious struggles that were tearing France apart and more than once accused the Protestants of fomenting discord in the country. For their part the Calvinists reproached him for being a priest, an atheist and for leading a licentious life; there was even a Protestant literary uprising against him. But R. in his poems (Poèmes, lib. II) replied to his religious enemies by proving that he had never taken Orders, but only enjoyed the revenues of certain abbeys. R. enjoys the reputation of being the greatest poet of his time; the following centuries ignored him completely: at least in France, though instead Scipione Maffei praised him and Goethe admired him. Only Romanticism drew him from obscurity together with his school: Balzac, Michelet and above all Sainte-Beuve rehabilitated him, placing him among the great French poets.