 | This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "La Pléiade" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(December 2023) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
La Pléiade (French pronunciation:[laplejad]) was a group of 16th-centuryFrench Renaissancepoets whose principal members werePierre de Ronsard,Joachim du Bellay andJean-Antoine de Baïf. The name was a reference to another literary group, the originalAlexandrian Pleiad of sevenAlexandrian poets and tragedians (3rd century B.C.), corresponding to the seven stars of thePleiadesstar cluster.
Notable members of "La Pléiade" consisted of the following people:
The core group of theFrench Renaissance "Pléiade"—Pierre de Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay and Jean-Antoine de Baïf—were young French poets who met at the Collège de Coqueret, where they studied under the famous Hellenist and Latinist scholarJean Dorat; they were generally called the "Brigade" at the time. Ronsard was regarded as the leader of the "Brigade", and remained the most popular and well-known poet of the group. The Pléiade's "manifesto" was penned by Joachim du premiere Bellay (La Défense et illustration de la langue française 1549). In it, Du Bellay detailed a literary program of renewal and revolution. The group aimed to break with earlier traditions of French poetry (especiallyMarot and thegrands rhétoriqueurs), and, maintaining that French (like the Tuscan ofPetrarch andDante) was a worthy language for literary expression, to attempt to ennoble the French language by imitating the Ancients.
To this end du Bellay recommendedvernacular innovation of Greek and Roman poetic forms, emulation of specific models, and the creation ofneologisms based on Greek and Latin. Among the models favoured by the Pléiade werePindar,Anacreon,Alcaeus and other poets of theGreek Anthology, as well asVirgil,Horace andOvid. The ideal was not one of slavish imitation, but of a poet so well-versed in the entire corpus of Ancient literature (du Bellay uses the metaphor of "digestion") that he would be able to convert it into an entirely new and rich poetic language in thevernacular. For some of the members of the Pléiade, the act of the poetry itself was seen as a form of divine inspiration (seePontus de Tyard for example), a possession by themuses akin to romantic passion, prophetic fervour or alcoholic delirium.
The forms that dominate the poetic production of these poets are the Petrarchansonnet cycle (developed around an amorous encounter or an idealised woman) and the Horatian/Anacreonticode (of the "wine, women and song" variety, often making use of the Horatiancarpe diem topos - life is short, seize the day). Ronsard also tried early on to adapt the Pindaric ode into French and, later, to write a nationalist verseepic modelled onHomer and Virgil (entitled theFranciade), which he never completed. Throughout the period, the use ofmythology is frequent, but so too is a depiction of the natural world (woods, rivers).
Minor figures also associated with this term include the following:
The use of the term "Pléiade" to refer to the group the French poets around Ronsard and Du Bellay is much criticised. In his poems, Ronsard frequently made lists of those he considered the best poets of his generation, but these lists changed several times. These lists always included Ronsard, du Bellay, de Baïf,Pontus de Tyard andÉtienne Jodelle; the last two positions were taken byRémy Belleau,Jacques Pelletier du Mans,Jean de la Péruse, orGuillaume des Autels. In a poem in 1556 Ronsard announced that the "Brigade" had become the "Pléiade", but apparently no one in Ronsard's literary circle used the expression to refer to himself, and use of the term stems principally fromHuguenot poets critical of Ronsard's pretensions (Ronsard was a polemicist for the royal Catholic policy). This use was finally consecrated by Ronsard's biographer Claude Binet, shortly after the poet's death. Some modern literary historians reject the use of the term, as it gives precedence to Ronsard's poetic ideas and minimises the diversity of poetic production in the French Renaissance.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
