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Pierre de Ronsard, "Prince of Poets," bright, particular star of the Pléiade,* who that is not French remembers him? How he hymned the Bourbon monarchs in the voluptuous vernacular of the French Renaissance; how he invented gorgeous adjectives and ingenious flowers of imagery to describe the monarchs' wives and female friends; how he (mythically) quarreled with Rabelais over a point of style; how Queen Bess of England sent him presents where he dwelt in his fine chateau, fattening on the income from rich abbeys and priories; how Mary, the little prisoner queen of Scotland, addressed him from her dungeon; how Tasso, poet of Italy, consulted him on this and that matter of technique? With most of the other frills and furbelows of his day, priceless and brilliant though they were, Poet Pierre is all but forgotten save by those French folk who make it their business to keep alive the glory that was Gaul and the grandeur of early French letters.
But Smith College bethought herself, or was reminded, of Poet Pierre's 400th birthday last week. It was the first time an American college had so honored him and Poet Pierre would have swelled with pride to hear those professors and young women of Smith singing the airs of his period and applauding a sonnet written for the occasion in his honor.
From Washington, D.C, came a letter from ex-Ambassador Jusserand of France, telling Smith of Pierre the Citizen rather than of Poet Pierre, favorite of the Muse. Wrote M. Jusserand: "His relations were of a dual sort, strangely contrasted. Being a court poet ... he was in duty bound to praise the monarchs. . . . But what is out of the common is that, when he had performed this duty ... he resumed his right of free speech as a citizen to say to those men, who 'were men like ourselves,' he thought, and 'who happen to have been born kings,' what were their obligations, their responsibilities, the faults of theirs that should be amended, for the good, not only of their own soul, but of their people and country."
*The Pléiade, or Brigade as it was first called: a literary constellation including also Poets Du Bellay, Boif, Belleau, Pontus de Thiard, Dorat, and Dramatist Jodelle. Ronsard "launched" the group in 1549 with a literary critique urging a return to the classics.