Three Poems by Pierre Ronsard

Abstract

Piere de Ronsard is generally recognized as the greatest poet of the Renaissance in France. He brought together a group of young poets known as the Pleiade. He and his fellow poet Joachim du Bellay authored The Defense and Illustration of the French Language, the first in a series of French manifestos which continue up today. Ronsard’s own opus is enormous: twenty volumes in the Laumonier edition. It contains sonnets, odes (Pindaric and Horatian), elegies (epistles) eclogues, hymns (telling of mythical deeds), satirical discourses, moral and philosophical poёmes, and an epic. His work is of major quality in all registers (sermo gravis, sermo mediocris, and sermo humilis). I consider Ronsard to be the greatest French poet, and I place him with Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin, Victor Hugo, and Rilke.