500th Anniversary Of The Birth Of Pierre De Ronsard

Nicknamed “prince of poets and poet of princes”, Pierre de Ronsard left an indelible mark on French Renaissance literature. He was born into an aristocratic family in 1524, and though destined for a promising military and diplomatic career, he was forced to abandon those ambitions after a sudden illness that left him partially deaf. Moving to Paris in 1544, he founded a literary circle with Joachim du Bellay called La Brigade, later renamed La Pléiade in 1553. The new movement aimed to forge a new genre of French-language literature, capable of standing alongside works of the great Greek or Latin poets. Ronsard published the first four volumes of his first great work, Les Odes, in 1550. He went on confirming his literary skills with Les Amours de Cassandre, an anthology of poems written in a decasyllabic metre. Others followed, including Les Amours in which Ronsard effectively defined the rules of what constituted a sonnet. He died in 1585 and was buried in the chapel crypt of the priory of Saint Cosme, gifted to him by King Charles IX in 1565.