Du Bellay, Joachim (c.1522-1560). The most important poet of the Pléiade after Ronsard, Du Bellay was born near Liré (Anjou) into a noble family already renowned for its diplomats, church dignitaries, and soldiers. Fragile in health and orphaned at an early age, he was brought up by an elder brother who neglected his education. Encouraged in his early poetic activities by Peletier, he abandoned his legal studies (begun in Poitiers in 1545) and joined Ronsard and Baïf at the Collège de Coqueret, where from 1547 to 1549 he received a humanist education under Dorat.
April 1549 saw the publication in Du Bellay's name of the Défense et illustration de la langue française, a theoretical programme faithfully illustrated in his collections of 1549-50: the first sonnet cycle in French poetry of essentially Petrarchist love poems (L'Olive), two collections of Horatian odes (Vers lyriques, Recueil de poésie), and an allegorized battle between the muses of poetry and ignorance (La Musagnœomachie). Prematurely aged and partially deaf after a lengthy serious illness (1550-2), Du Bellay discovered in poetry consolatory and therapeutic values. Certain poems published in collections of 1552-3 are more personal and less humanist in nature and distantly look forward to Les Regrets. The elegaic tone of La Complainte du désespéré (1552) and the satire of Petrarchism in A une dame (1553) anticipate, for example, the two major inspirations of Les Regrets, whilst the Christian content of the Hymne chrétien and La Lyre chrétienne (1552) prefigure Du Bellay's religious concerns as a Gallican Catholic found in Les Regrets.
April 1553 marked his departure for Rome in the retinue of his cousin Cardinal Jean du Bellay. Enthusiastic to undertake the humanist pilgrimage to Italy and perhaps ambitious for advancement in a diplomatic career, Du Bellay was to be disappointed in his expectations. Although too much credence must not be placed on the personal witness of Les Regrets—allowance should be made for hyperbole and literary convention—he describes his Roman stay as an exile and as a series of disappointments. He returned to Paris in 1557 to further disappointments (family and legal disputes, continuing poor health, dissatisfaction with the French court), but with the consolation of publishing in 1558 four very different collections of poetry: the Poemata (four books of Latin verse), the Divers jeux rustiques (a composite collection of recreational pieces, largely facetious, satirical, and rustic in inspiration), and two sonnet sequences, the Antiquités de Rome and Les Regrets, which finally liberated the sonnet cycle from its associations with love poetry and Petrarchism.
A dense and suggestive mosaic of assimilated humanist themes and images, the 32 alternating decasyllabic and alexandrine sonnets of the Antiquités and the 15 allegorical sonnets of the Songe which follows (translated by Edmund Spenser as The Visions of Bellay) contrast the past glory of Rome with her present decay, reflect on the causes of her downfall within a cyclical view of history (translatio imperii), and draw general philosophical and political lessons from the Roman experience concerning the vanity of human endeavour and the vulnerability of France on the eve of civil war.
Distancing himself from the more elevated principles of the Défense and from the erudite concerns of Ronsard, Du Bellay defines the 191 alexandrine sonnets of Les Regrets as a natural and simple record of personal thoughts and feelings. The two principal inspirations—elegaic and satirical—lament the areas of dissatisfaction of the poet's ‘exile’, pass under mordant review the moral decadence and the spiritual barrenness of the papacy and the Vatican, and, in sonnets written on Du Bellay's return to France (which anticipate Le Poète courtisan of 1559), satirize the philistinism and hypocrisy of the French court. Although some critics emphasize the ‘modern’ and ‘sincere’ aspects of Les Regrets, the roles of poetic convention and literary reminiscence must not be underestimated, for not only have Ovid (Tristia) and Horace (Satires) shaped the conception of the collection and the persona Du Bellay presents, but familiarity with contemporary Italian burlesque poetry has influenced the scope and nature of the French poet's satire.
Whilst Du Bellay lacks the vitality, the breadth of vision, and the sublime eloquence of Ronsard, his reputation is assured by the evocative power and suggestivity of his language, the visual impact and the picturesque precision of his imagery, the delicate resonance of his sensibility, his command of the sonnet form, and his sureness in matters of rhythm, musicality, and rhetoric.
[Malcolm Quainton]
Bibliography
- R. Griffin, Coronation of the Poet: Joachim Du Bellay's Debt to the Trivium (1969)
- G. Gadoffre, Du Bellay et le sacré (1978)
- G. H. Tucker, The Poet's Odyssey: Joachim Du Bellay and the ‘Antiquitez de Rome’ (1990)
