In some ways my focus on Ronsard’s sonnets is a betrayal of his ideals. For Ronsard and the Pleiade, the higher form of art was the Pindaric ode, and Ronsard set himself the target of introducing this to France. It was the rather tentative response to his first four books of Odes in 1550, and their high-flown language and learned obscurity, that perduaded him to try something ‘simpler’, the love sonnet. That it was the sonnet which made him famous and revered did not stop him turning back to other, longer verse-forms for much of his life.
Ronsard wrote huge quantities of verse other than odes sonnets: lengthy hymns, epitaphs and didactic poems as well as his epic ‘Franciad’; and shorter epigrams, ‘gaieties’, and the ‘Dernier Vers’ which contains some of his most famous short poems meditating on death. Any and all of them will be gathered here – though I am not sure I’ll ever tackle the Franciad !
Oeuvres de Ronsard 