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
oeuvrecomprising 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 12 October 2024.]