Nature and the Country in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century French Poetry

Abstract

The statement is often made that the Pléiade sang nature with exuberance and freshness. The feeling for nature, which virtually passed out of French literature when the poésie courtoise finally died with Charles d'Orléans, began to reappear early in the sixteenth century with Jean Le Maire de Belges. This re-ëmergence was at first very slow, and the new feeling did not attain its fullest development until the second half of the century. It is perhaps well to say at the outset that the words “a feeling for nature” applied to the poetry of the sixteenth century are not the equivalent of “a nature poetry,” and must not be taken to mean that the century of the Renaissance in France created a genuine poetry of nature. If we define this as consisting essentially in a sincere love and a spontaneous, as opposed to a conventional, treatment of nature; a concern with nature for its own sake instead of using it merely as an ornament in poetry with a primarily human interest; and a sympathetic interpenetration between the soul of man and the soul of things, we shall not find these conditions fulfilled in the French poetry of this period. In the first part of this paper I shall endeavor to trace the origins of the feeling for nature exhibited in sixteenth-century French poetry, to define its limits, and to explain why the Pléiade did not create a true nature poetry; in the second part I propose to show that the interest in nature was diverted in the last quarter of the century into another channel, to assume the form which may be called the solitude and desert motif, its predominant mode of expression in the next century, and to set forth the causes of this deviation.