Joachim du bellay biography templates word

When he was twenty-three, however, he received permission to go to Poitiers to study law, no doubt with a view to his obtaining perferment through his kinsman the Cardinal Jean du Bellay. It was probably in that du Bellay met Ronsard in an inn on the way to Poitiers, an event which may justly be regarded as the starting-point of the French school of Renaissance poetry.

The two had much in common, and immediately became fast friends. Du Bellay returned with Ronsard to Paris to join the circle of students of the humanities attached to Jean Daurat q.

Joachim du bellay sonnet

Ronsard and his friends dissented violently from Sibilet on this and other points, and they doubtless felt a natural resentment at finding their ideas forestalled and, moreover, inadequately presented. Du Bellay maintained that the French language as it was then constituted was too poor to serve as a medium for the higher forms of poetry, but he contended that by proper cultivation it might be brought on a level with the classical tongues.

He condemned those who despaired of their mother tongue, and used Latin for their more serious and ambitious work. For translations from the ancients he would substitute imitations. Not only were the forms of classical poetry to be imitated, but a separate poetic language and style, distinct from those employed in prose, were to be used. The French language was to be enriched by a development of its internal resources and by discreet borrowing from the Latin and Greek.

Both du Bellay and Ronsard laid stress on the necessity of prudence in these borrowings, and both repudiated the charge of wishing to latinize their mother tongue. The book was a spirited defence of poetry and of the possibilities of the French language; it was also a declaration of war on those writers who held less heroic views.

Joachim du bellay notre-dame

The violent attacks made by du Bellay on Marot and his followers, and on Sibilet, did not go unanswered. Aneau pointed out the obvious inconsistency of inculcating imitation of the ancients and depreciating native poets in a work professing to be a defence of the French language. Olive , a collection of love-sonnets written in close imitation of Petrarch, first appeared in With it were printed thirteen odes entitled Vers lyriques.

Olive has been supposed to be an anagram for the name of a Mlle Viole, but there is little evidence of real passion in the poems, and they may perhaps be regarded as a Petrarcan exercise, especially as, in the second edition, the dedication to his lady is exchanged for one to Marguerite de Valois, sister of Henry II.