Ronsard, Pierre de

Ronsard, Pierre de (pyĕr də rôNsär`), 1524–1585, French poet. As page, then squire, Ronsard seemed destined for a career at court both in France and abroad. However, deafness turned him to a more secluded and studious life at the Collège de Coqueret where he became leader of the Pléiade (see under Pleiad). Named poet royal, he wrote a great number of poems on many themes, especially patriotism, love, and death: sonnets on Petrarch, odes after Pindar and Horace, elegies, eclogues, and songs. Of his love poems the best-known appear in Sonnets pour Hélène (1578; tr. by Humbert Wolfe, 1934). Ronsard's most ambitious effort was La Franciade (1572), an unfinished epic. He also wrote (1562) two long patriotic poems deploring the Wars of Religion. Ronsard's reputation was long in eclipse, but after Sainte-Beuve's favorable criticism he assumed his place as one of the greatest of French poets.

Bibliography

See Songs and Sonnets of Pierre de Ronsard (tr. 1924); biography by M. Bishop (1940); studies by I. Silver (1961 and 1971) and B. R. Leslie (1979).

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Ronsard, Pierre de

(born Sept. 11, 1524, La Possonnière, near Couture, France—died Dec. 27, 1585, Saint-Cosme, near Tours) French poet. Of a noble family, Ronsard turned to scholarship and literature after an illness left him partially deaf. He was the foremost poet of La Pléiade, a literary group that used Classical and Italian models to elevate the French language as a medium for literary expression. He was recognized in his lifetime as a prince of poets; among his diverse works were Odes (1550), inspired by Horace; Les Amours (1552); the unfinished La Franciade (1572), in imitation of Virgil's Aeneid, meant to be the national epic; and Sonnets pour Hélène, now perhaps his most famous collection. He perfected and established the alexandrine as the classic form in French for scathing satire, elegiac tenderness, and tragic passion.