The Pléiade was a group of seven poets, most of whom had been formed under the inspiring tutelage of Jean Daurat, professor of ancient languages and eloquence at the Collège Coqueret in Paris. The name, adopted in imitation of the late school of Greek poets at Alexandria, was a symbol of their determination to restore the ancient cult of beauty as displayed in arts and letters. In 1549, they published this determination in a manifesto entitled: La Défense et Illustration de la langue française. In the conception of this work, they all seem to have participated, although the labor and credit for its composition belong to Joachim du Bellay. The first part, La Défense, undertakes the defense of French as a suitable medium of literary expression as against Latin. Du Bellay explains the poverty of French and shows how it can be remedied by following the example of the Romans who had used the Greeks as guides. He urged the enrichment of the language by the coinage of new words, by widening the usage of words already existing, by the adoption into the literary language of technical and dialect words and by the rehabilitation of words which had become obsolete. In the second part, Illustration, ignoring all French poetry before his time except the Roman de la Rose, du Bellay shows how French may be given "lustre," by imitation, by invention and by "doctrine." He urges a more elevated ideal as the aim of the poet, the abandoning of the old types of poetic expression, such as "rondeaux, ballades, virelais, chants royaux, chansons et autres telles épiceries," and he invites the new poet to imitate the classic genres such as the epigram, elegy, ode, the modern sonnet and comedy and tragedy. Du Bellay, less ambitious as poet than as a propagandist, devoted himself chiefly to the composition of sonnets. His first collection, Olive, appeared in 1550. His best known sonnets are found in the two collections: Les Antiquités de Rome (1558) and Les Regrets (1559). Ronsard, recognized from the first as the chief of the group, composed continually in all the types of lyric poetry which had been advocated in La Défense until his death in 1585. The best known collections of his poems are: Les Odes (1550) and Les Amours addressed to Cassandre (1552), to Marie (1557) and to Hélène (1574). |