Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas

Du Bartas, Guillaume de Salluste (1544-90). French soldier and diplomat, and a religious epic poet of considerable influence. He studied law at Toulouse, in 1566 inherited the title of nobility conferred a year earlier on his father, and in 1567 became Doctor of Law. Having retired to his estate, he wrote a theoretical work advocating poetry of a Christian nature (La Muse chrétienne, 1574), which he published together with several didactic poems of Calvinist or cosmic inspiration composed between 1567 and 1572 (Judith, Uranie, Le Triomphe de la foi).

Less intransigent than his co-religionist d'Aubigné, Du Bartas nevertheless fought in the Wars of Religion as an officer attached to the court of Navarre. The same partisan commitment and religious zeal are present in his two major biblical and scientific epics, the Première Semaine ou Création du Monde (1578), and the unfinished Seconde Semaine ou Enfance du Monde (1584). Gentilhomme Ordinaire to Henri de Navarre (later Henri IV) from 1585, Du Bartas undertook diplomatic missions to Scotland and Denmark. Shortly after celebrating the Battle of Ivry in a poem, he died fighting against the Ligue.

Du Bartas's fame, which threatened even to rival the poetic supremacy of Ronsard, was established by the Première Semaine, a work which was translated into several languages, which ran into some 25 editions in as many years (several accompanied by learned commentaries by Simon Goulart), and which either inspired or was admired by d'Aubigné, Tasso, Milton and, later, Goethe. Based on patristic commentaries on Genesis (St Basil, Hexaemeron), the structure of the French text is dictated by its hexameric theme. It attempts an encylopaedic inventory of human knowledge within a tradition of scientific poetry which includes Scève, Baïf, and Peletier, and within a didactic and religious framework which traces the variety and harmony of creation to the unique glory of God. Past critics emphasized Du Bartas's lapses of taste, his excesses of style, his infelicities of language, his absence of selection, and his proselytizing manner, but more recently scholars have reappraised his poetry within the perspective of ‘baroque’ aesthetics and have demonstrated how, by a complex networking of symbolic correspondences and analogies, by detailed and evocative descriptions, by sustained use of metaphor, and by linguistic, rhetorical, and phonic inventiveness, he creates a universal language which stylistically imitates diversity within unity by associating microcosm and macrocosm, words and things.

[Malcolm Quainton]

Bibliography

• J. Dauphiné, Guillaume Salluste du Bartas, poète scientifique (1983)
• J. Miernowski, Dialectique et connaissance dans ‘La Sepmaine’ de Du Bartas (1992)

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Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas (1544–July 1590) was a French poet. A Huguenot, he served under Henry of Navarre. He is known as an epic poet. La Sepmaine; ou, Creation du monde (1578) was a hugely influential hexameral work, relating the creation of the world and the history of man. It was translated into many languages, including English, and helped inspire Milton's Paradise Lost. It was followed quickly by La Seconde Sepmaine (1584) which Du Bartas did not manage to finish before falling fatally ill.

Du Bartas and the Scottish Court

James VI of Scotland was particularly impressed by Du Bartas after receiving a volume of his poetry in 1579. He translated Uranie which appeared in his first poetical publication Essayes of a Prentise The significance of this poem was that the muse Uranie manifests herself to persuade the poet to concentrate on religious rather than secular poetry:

O ye that wolde your browes with Laurel bind,

What larger feild I pray you can you find,

Then is his praise, who brydles heavens most cleare

Makes mountaines tremble, and howest (sic) hells to feare?

Thomas Hudson, part of the coterie of poets gathered around James court, sometimes known as the "Castalian Band" translated Judith in 1584. James contributed a laudatory sonnet to the publication. Du Bartas responded by translating James' Lepanto and in 1587 he was sent by Henry of Navarre to the Scottish court to discuss the possibility of James marrying Henri's sister. Although poetry was also a shared interest, James failed in his attempt to persuade Du Bartas to stay in Scotland.

James regarded Du Bartas very highly and encouraged other poets to translate his works, following his accession to the English throne. Thomas Winter quotes from James' Basilikon Doron where he touches on Du Bartas, in the dedicatory epistle of his translation of du Bartas's Third Dayes Creation (1604). Joshua Sylvester, another English poet around the court of King James, also translated Essay of the Second Week (1598) and The Divine Weeks of the World's Birth (1604).

Du Bartas' poems went rapidly out of fashion as the 17th century, characterised by a tight and precise style, reacted against its somewhat wordy and expansive - and at times unintentionally pathetic - verse, and Du Bartas has never regained the popularity he once enjoyed.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas

• Encyclopædia Britannica
• 'The accession of King James I and English religious poetry' by James Doelman, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 34, 1994

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