A provincial of the minor nobility, Ronsard was born in 1524 at La Possonnière, near Vendôme and in the Loire valley. He went on to become incontestably France's finest poet prior to the nineteenth century, despite not being associated with any great individual work. Though he planned a major epic, the

Franciade

, that gesture of cultural patriotism remained uncompleted, his vast

oeuvre

comprising instead an enormous number of shorter pieces, to which he added and which he revised and reclassified endlessly during his life, creating, to quote one of his modern students, “an ordered chaos”.

His father, Louis de Ronsard, was soldier and courtier to both Louis XII and Francis I, and the young Ronsard followed his example, attending, for instance, the Scottish court of James V subsequent

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Citation: Parkin, John. "Pierre de Ronsard". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 03 November 2006 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3838, accessed 19 March 2024.]

3838 Pierre de Ronsard 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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