Pierre de Ronsard

Posthumous portrait of Pierre de Ronsard by an anonymous artist around 1620 in the Musée des Beaux-arts in Blois

Pierre de Ronsard (born September 6, 1524 in the Château de la Possonnière near Couture-sur-Loir , † December 27, 1585 in the Saint-Cosme priory near La Riche , Touraine ) was a French author. Highly valued by contemporaries, then long forgotten, he is now considered the most important French poet of the second half of the 16th century.

Life and work

The teenage years

Ronsard was the younger son of an educated and literary amateur nobleman who was an officer in the Italian wars of the kings Louis XII. and then Francis I had distinguished himself and from 1526 to 1530, i.e. during Pierre's early childhood, was separated from his family for a longer period of time because he served as steward for the two eldest sons of King Franz. These were held hostage in Madrid by Emperor Charles V after he had won the Battle of Pavia .

After initially being taught by his father, Ronsard was sent from the family's rural castle to distant Paris at the age of nine to attend the Collège de Navarre as a boarding school student. However, he was brought home after just six months. At the age of twelve he returned to the capital, this time to court. Here, thanks to the closeness of his father to the king, Francis I, and to his sons, he became a page with the eldest, François , the Dauphin . When he died shortly afterwards, Ronsard was assigned to the third prince, Charles . A little later, in the summer of 1537, it was passed on to the king's 17-year-old daughter, Madeleine , who had just been married to the young Scottish King James Stuart . In her wake he traveled to Scotland and stayed there until her untimely death in 1538. The journey home took him overland through England and Flanders . At fourteen he went back to Paris, where he again became a page with Charles. In 1539 he traveled to Scotland again, this time in the wake of the Scottish King's new bride, Marie de Guise .

In 1540 he accompanied the French diplomat Lazare de Baïf (1496–1547), a relative, on a three-month trip to western Germany and Alsace . Lazare de Baïf was supposed to get in touch with Protestant German princes in order to win them over as allies of France against Emperor Charles V. Through the highly educated Lazare de Baïf, Ronsard came into contact with humanistic ideas.

Afterwards he suffered an illness ( otitis media ?) That made him “half deaf” (completely deaf on one side? Hard of hearing on both sides?). He therefore gave up the officer and / or courtier and diplomatic career that had been planned for him up until then and returned home. There he read Latin literature in particular and practiced his pen on French and Latin verses as well as on rewriting texts by the great Roman poets Virgil and especially Horace . In 1543, at the age of 18, he was given minor ordinations in order to be able to fill one of the well endowed church pledges over which the kings had a right of disposal and with which they preferably provided for younger sons of noble families. In the same year Ronsard showed his adaptations of Horatian odes to the well-known humanist Jacques Peletier du Mans , who encouraged him.

Humanistic apprenticeship, first publications

In 1545, his father had recently died, he went back to Paris. Here he was accepted by Lazare de Baïf and took part in the lessons his (a good seven years younger) son Jean-Antoine received from a tutor, the young Graecist Jean Dorat . Both students followed Dorat when he became director of the humanist-oriented Collège de Coqueret in 1547 . Ronsard even rented a room from him and under his influence began to recreate odes by the ancient Greek author Pindar .

Perhaps as early as 1543, at a funeral, he had met Joachim du Bellay, who was a little older and who had similar interests. At the end of 1547 he met him again on a trip and persuaded him to come to Paris to go to school with Dorat. Ronsard was undoubtedly involved as a discussion partner in the conception of Du Bellay's programmatic writing La Défence et illustration de la langue française (German: Defense and Fame of the French Language ), which appeared in early 1549.

In the same year 1549 he joined forces with Du Bellay, Jean-Antoine de Baïf , Jean Dorat and a few other writers interested in humanism to form a group which they initially called "La Brigade" ("The Schaar / Group"). However, it went down in literary history under the name “ La Pléiade ” (“The Seven Stars”) after it was narrowed down to seven members and renamed around 1556 by Ronsard, who had quickly advanced to become an informal boss.

In 1550 Ronsard published the odes he had written up to then in the anthology Les quatre premiers livres des Odes ( The first four books of the Odes ), propagating the ideas of the “Brigade” in the foreword. In 1552 he pushed a sequel as Le cinquième (fifth) livre des Odes .

The public success of the odes, with which he introduced a new genre in French literature and intended to establish himself as the “first French lyric author” (preface), was less than hoped. While they dealt with a variety of subjects in a variety of forms, e.g. B. praising more or less important people (à la Pindar) or the praise of beautiful nature or the happiness of a simple life enjoying the moment in a rural idyll (à la Horace). But especially the pompous Pindarian odes of books I and V were overloaded with erudition and were clearly aimed more at the applause of friends than at that of a wider readership / audience. Even the court, to which Ronsard had access as a former playmate of Henry II , who had ruled since 1547 , reacted coolly and preferred the pleasant poems, such as those produced in particular by the court poet Mellin de Saint-Gelais in the style of Clément Marot .

On the way to recognition

Ronsard took the lesson to heart. In 1552 he had an anthology of love poems written in previous years - almost exclusively sonnets - appear under the title Les Amours de Cassandre . Although they were written in the extremely elaborate style of the Petrarkism of the time, they met the taste at court considerably better than the Odes . They sing about a certain Cassandra Salviati, whom the author claims to have seen on April 21, 1545 at a court festival in Blois as a 13-year-old girl in a similarly fleeting poetic scene as Dante his muse Beatrice or Petrarch on April 6, 1327 his Laura. How far this love was really felt or just imagined can hardly be decided. An important motive for Ronsard was certainly the fact that his friend Du Bellay had recently written a cycle of sonnets to a muse named Olive and published it in France in 1549 as the first collection of Petrarchist love poems.

Above all, however, Ronsard's texts that he subsequently wrote approached the style of Clément Marot , from which he had condescendingly distanced himself in the foreword of the Odes in order to proudly present himself as a disciple of the ancient Greeks and Romans. In addition, in addition to Horace, he now also imitated Anacreon , d. H. the songs about love, wine and zest for life, which (wrongly, as we know today) were ascribed to the ancient Greek Anakreon and which his brigade friend Henri Estienne just published (1554), while at the same time another brigade friend, Rémi Belleau , busy with its transmission (published 1556).

His turn to a broader, albeit predominantly courtly, audience is shown in Ronsard's next anthologies. They combine longer odes as well as shorter “Ödchen”, odelettes , sonnets, chansons, elegies, epigrams, verse pistles and other poems from various contemporary genres on a wide variety of topics in a colorful mix . Significantly , their titles are Le Livret des folâtries , 1553 (= the little book of jokes), Le Bocage , 1554 (= the grove, cf. Latin silvae ) and Mélanges , 1554 (= miscellaneous).

Ronsard's efforts were rewarded not only by the favor of his audience, but also by King Henry, who awarded him several benefices in 1553 (which could be accumulated). With this he was financially independent. B. was able to support his underage nieces and nephews when his older brother died in 1556.

In 1555 he had a small volume of love poems together, which he published as La Continuation [continuation] of Amours . In 1556 he had another small volume followed: La nouvelle [new] continuation des Amours . Both contain poems of different forms, which initially sing about Cassandre and later a simple girl named Marie, whom Ronsard met in early 1555 as a 15-year-old in a more natural-looking "lower" style.

Also in 1555 and 1556, but like a contrast program, he had two volumes with the title Innes (= hymns) published. For some time now he had been cultivating another genre based on the Greek model: longer texts in pairs of rhyming ten-syllables or Alexandrians to praise important people at court, e.g. B. of the Chancellor of France , chancelier de France Michel de L'Hôpital , but also to glorify mythological figures or abstract beings such as eternity or death. The Innes made a visible contribution to increasing Ronsard's reputation at court.

The poet in court

In 1558, after the death of Saint-Gelais, Ronsard was given the post of "conseiller et aumônier du roi" (royal councilor and almsman ). At the same time, he naturally took on the role of court poet, who on many occasions, e.g. B. festivities, occasional poems produced.

Even after the accidental death of Heinrich II (1559), Ronsard's position at court remained intact. In 1560 he received further benefices from the new young King Franz II (1559–60) and the Queen Mother and Regent Catherine of Medici , making him a wealthy man.

Also in 1560 he published a first complete edition of his works, which he divided into four sections or volumes: Les Amours , Les Odes , Les Poèmes (poems of various kinds) and Les Hymnes . He retained this classification in the subsequent new editions, adding the new poems that were added in the meantime to the appropriate section.

In 1561 he presented the 12-year-old new King Charles IX. a textbook written in Alexandrians for young monarchs ( institution [instruction] pour l'adolescence du Roi ), with which he naturally hoped for the approval of the queen mother and regent Catherine. The hidden background, however, was the domestic political situation in France, where tensions between Catholics and Reformed had escalated sharply since 1560 .

The political pamphleteer

When open civil war broke out in 1562, Ronsard, who until then had seen himself as a kind of apolitical high priest of his art, could no longer treat politics only indirectly. Since he had obviously not been completely opposed to the Reformation, he first tried to have a balancing effect and published several “speeches” (discours) in rhyming Alexandrians as brochures: D. à la Reine = speech to the queen; D. sur les misères de ce temps = speech about the needs of the present; Rémontrance au peuple de France = reminder to the French Volk (all 1562). A little later, however, he decidedly committed himself to the side of the crown, which remained Catholic, and became a dreaded pamphleteer , although he certainly thought of his church mortgages, which he would have had to give up as a Protestant. Accordingly, he was attacked by the other side, with a strong tendency towards a good life, especially in order to discredit him morally. He responded ironically with the Réponse aux injures et calomnies de je ne sais quels prédicanteaux et ministreaux de Genève (= response to the accusations and slander of some [Protestant] Geneva preachers and priests, 1563). Naturally he was stamped as a Catholic author for the French Protestants.

In 1564 and 1566 he accompanied King Charles and the Queen Mother on two of their short-term pacification trips to the province.

In between, however, in 1565, he also published non-political things again, namely the volume of poetry Élégies, mascarades et bergeries [Schäfereien] , which mainly contains occasional poetry from his role as court poet, as well as an Abrégé de l'art poétique [abstract of poetry] in which he grosso modo sums up the Pléiade program.

From 1566 he withdrew from politics and stayed more and more frequently in his priory Saint-Cosme near Tours , which he had received in 1565. There he completed a new complete edition of his works in 1567 and in 1569 two small volumes with "poèmes", poems of various kinds.

The late years

Also in 1569 he started the great project of his life: the verse epic La Franciade . As early as 1550 he had submitted the draft to Heinrich II of an epic about the legendary founder of the Franconian Empire, Francus , which was inspired by the parahistoric work Illustrations de Gaule et singularités de Troye by Jean Lemaire de Belges (1511–1513). Now he was finally tackling it, not least with the intention of giving denominationally divided France, torn by religious wars, a national epic based on the model of Virgil's Aeneid . However, despite intensive efforts, he was only able to complete 4 of the 24 planned chants. They appeared a few days before the Protestant pogrom on Bartholomew's Night on 22/23. August 1572. After this he broke off the work. The hopes of an internal pacification of France had evidently turned out to be an illusion. In addition, the ten-syllable , which he had chosen as the meter, was evidently not very suitable and ultimately he was not an epic himself. Presumably, however, neither himself nor his audience could really warm up to the apocryphal figure of Francus, the son of the Trojan hero Hector who was invented in the Middle Ages and who, together with the legendary Rome founder Aeneas , saved himself from the conquered Troy and in turn “ Francia ”and even founded the Capetian dynasty . In the meantime (1560) the very successful book Recherches de la France by Étienne Pasquier had been published, which quickly changed the ideas of the French in the sense that not just any Francus (and also not the Romans) were their forefathers, but the Celtic Gauls . Ronsard's justification, the death of Charles IX, added later to the end of the epic. (1574) had robbed him of the courage to complete the work, is certainly not to be taken at his word.

After the failure of the Franciade and in view of the almost non-stop religious wars, but also the fact that the new King Heinrich III. (since 1574) did not particularly appreciate, Ronsard practically withdrew completely into private life and on his two favorite pledges, Saint-Cosme and Croixval in the Vendômois. Here he revised his works with a view to another (now the fifth) complete edition. It appeared in 1578 and, as a new element in the Les Amours section, contained a series of melancholy poems about the death of Marie and above all the approx. 130 Sonnets pour Hélène (sc. Hélène de Surgères, a maid of honor of the Queen Mother). With these sonnets Ronsard celebrated a late, surprising and touching comeback as a love poet.

Increasingly sickly and plagued by gout , he fundamentally revised the corpus of his works in the following years, whereby, as with the previous revisions, he deleted some texts that seem to be successful today and improved others to make them worse. In 1584 he had the sixth and last complete edition published, which contains another section of mixed poems under the title Bocage royal (= royal grove). Alongside and afterwards, as always, he also wrote new things. His last poems, which he z. Some of them were still written in view of the imminent death, were published posthumously in 1586 as Les derniers verse .

Aftermath

Although he was a very recognized author who set standards during his lifetime, Ronsard was largely forgotten in the 17th and 18th centuries. The reason for this was not least the derogatory judgments that François de Malherbe and Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux passed on him one or two generations later . Only the romantics rediscovered the lyrical part of his work in the narrower sense, and the literary historians of the 19th and 20th centuries. Century assigned it the overall very important place that it deserves and that he had self-confidently claimed for himself during his lifetime.

In 1999 the asteroid (10139) Ronsard was named after him.

Works

• Les odes. 1550-54.
• Les amours de Cassandre. 1552.
• Les bocages. 1554.
• Les amours de Marie. 1555/56.
• Les hymnes. 1555, 1556.
• Églogues. 1560-67.
• La Franciade. 1572.
• La mort de Marie. 1578.
• Sonnets pour Hélène. 1578.

Modern editions

French

• Œuvres complètes I – III. Edition critique par Paul Laumonier, révisée et complétée par Isidore Silver et Raymond Lebègue . Didier, Paris 1959–1960
• Œuvres complètes 1. Édition établie, présentée et annotée by Jean Céard, Daniel Ménager and Michel Simonin. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade . Gallimard, Paris 1993
• Uvres complètes 2 Édition établie, présentée et annotée par Jean Céard, Daniel Ménager et Michel Simonin. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Gallimard, Paris 1994 ISBN 2-07-011337-X

French and German

• Sonnets d'amour - sonnets of love. Translated by Franz Fassbinder in collaboration with Hanns H. Fassbinder. Churfürstenverlag, Mainz 1946
• Cupids for Cassandre - Le premier livre des amours. Translated from Georg Holzer . Ed. And commentary by Carolin Fischer. Ivory, Berlin 2006 ISBN 978-3-932245-79-4
• Cupids for Marie - Le second livre des amours; the second book of the Cupids with the sonnets and madrigals for Astrée. Translated from Georg Holzer. Ed. And commentary by Carolin Fischer. Ivory, Berlin 2010 ISBN 978-3-941184-05-3
• Sonnets for Helene - Sonnets pour Hélène . Translated by Irene Kafka . Nachw. Franz Blei . Georg Müller , Munich and Hegner, Hellerau 1923
  • Sonnets for Hélène. With the scattered cupids . Ivory, Berlin 2017 ISBN 978-3-941184-68-8

literature

• Hermann Hartwig: Ronsard studies . Velhagen & Klasing, Bielefeld 1902. ( digitized )
• Henri Chamard: Histoire de la Pléiade. Didier, Paris 1940.
• Frédéric Desonay: Ronsard, poète de l'amour. 3 vols. Bruxelles 1952-1959.
• Harald Weinrich: The poem "Bel Aubépin" by Ronsard . In: Archive for the Study of Modern Languages ​​195, 1959, pp. 302–316. Also in: K. Wais (Ed.): Interpretations of French poems . Darmstadt 1970, pp. 45-63.
• Mary Morrison: Ronsard and Desportes. In: Bibliothèque d´Humanisme et Renaissance. 1966, pp. 294-322.
• Heinz Willi Wittschier: The Poetry of the Pléiade . Athenäum Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1971.
• János Riesz: Pierre de Ronsard: Amours de Cassandre CXXXIX. In: H. Hinterhäuser (Ed.): The French poetry. From Villon to the present . Bagel, Düsseldorf 1975, pp. 77-86.
• Jürgen von Stackelberg: French literature, Renaissance and Baroque . Artemis, Munich 1984, ISBN 3-7608-1313-5 .
• Rainer Warning: Petrarkist dialogicity using the example of Ronsard . In: Wolf-Dieter Stempel, Karlheinz Stierle (Hrsg.): The plurality of worlds. Aspects of the Renaissance in Romania . Fink, Munich 1987, ISBN 3-7705-2448-9 , pp. 327-358.
• Michel Bideaux, Hélène Moreau: Histoire de la littérature française du XVIe siècle. Ligugé / Poitiers, Nathan 1991.
• André Gendre: L'Esthétique de Ronsard. SEDES, Paris 1997 ISBN 2-7181-9063-9
• Ulrich Schulz-Buschhaus : Ronsard's positions in the baroque of European Renaissance poetry. Using the example of two Icarus sonnets . Institute for Romance Studies. University of Graz 1997 [1] .
• Christoph Oliver Mayer: Pierre de Ronsard and the development of the "premier champ littéraire." Studies in literary studies. Vol. 2. Schäfer, Herne 2001 ISBN 3-933337-27-5
• Ursula Hennigfeld: The ruined body. Petrarkistic sonnets from a transcultural perspective. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2008 ISBN 978-3-8260-3768-9

Lexicons

• Dictionnaire des littératures de langue française. Publ. Sous la direction de Jean-Pierre de Beaumarchais, Daniel Couty, Alain Rey. 4 vols. Bordas, Paris 1984–1994
• Dictionnaire des œuvres littéraires de langue française. Publ. Sous la direction de Jean-Pierre de Beaumarchais, Daniel Couty. 4 vols. Bordas, Paris 1994, ISBN 2-04-018550-X (vol. 1) ISBN 2-04-018552-6 (vol. 2) ISBN 2-04-018554-2 (vol. 3) ISBN 2- 04-027022-1 (vol. 4)
• Dictionnaire des écrivains de langue française. Publ. Sous la direction de Jean-Pierre de Beaumarchais, Daniel Couty, Alain Rey. 2 vols. Larousse, Paris 2001 ISBN 2-03-505198-3

Web links

Commons : Pierre de Ronsard  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

Wikiquote: Pierre de Ronsard  - Quotes

• Literature by and about Pierre de Ronsard in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by and about Pierre de Ronsard  in the German Digital Library
• Article "Ronsard" in the names, titles and dates of French literature by Gert Pinkernell