Pierre de Ronsard

Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585), French poet of the Pléiade (see Pleiad). He was born near Vendôme and trained as a royal page and then a squire but became deaf and turned to books. In 1544 he went to Paris, where he studied with the French classicist Jean Dorat at the Collège Coqueret. At this time Ronsard and others, including the French poet Joachim du Bellay, formed the famous Pléiade, a group of writers dedicated to reforming French language and literature. Ronsard first published Odes (5 volumes, 1550, 1552), scholarly poems modeled after those of the classical Greek poet Pindar and the Roman poet Horace. In 1552Amours de Cassandre (Loves of Cassandra), a sequence of graceful love sonnets influenced by the Italian poet Petrarch, followed. These works made Ronsard famous, and he continued to write in both styles, publishing Continuation des amours in 1555 and Hymnes in 1556. He enjoyed the friendship of the French king Charles IX. Ronsard's epic La Franciad (1572), about the origins of the French nation, was left unfinished. His best-known love poems were the melancholy Sonnets for Helene (1578; trans. 1934).