Défense et illustration de la langue française, La. Composed in response to Sebillet's Art poétique (1548) and indebted to an Italian treatise by Speroni, the Défense was published in Du Bellay's name (1549) as the manifesto of the future Pléiade. Inspired by the nationalistic desire to emulate the example of Italy, it advocates the renewal of French as a poetic language by means of a programme of linguistic, stylistic, and metrical enrichment and a process of imitation of Greco-Roman and Italian genres and sources (imitation involved a dynamic method of innutrition, the spontaneous and personalized expression of assimilated and fully digested reading).
— Malcolm Quainton
