Ronsard et la fabrique des 'Poëmes' by François Rouget

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ronsard et la fabrique des 'Poëmes' by François Rouget Alice Roullière Ronsard et la fabrique des 'Poëmes'. By François Rouget. (Cahiers d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 166) Geneva: Droz. 2020. 362 pp. SwF 45. ISBN 978-2-60006059-2. In this monograph, François Rouget rethinks the distinction between 'homogeneous collections', 'mixed collections', and 'recueils d'attente' that have hitherto been used to describe Ronsard's balancing act between multiple re-editions of his Œuvres and stand-alone collections. Within this careful design, the Poëmes hold an unusual place: this title designates a section in five books of the Œuvres, first published in 1560, to which the collection of the Sixième et Septième livres des Poëmes (1569) is considered a later add-on. In 1569, Ronsard transforms what was a section of his 'Complete Works' into an independent collection, thus retroactively formalizing the genre. As Rouget shows in his study, the choice of compiling such a variety of poems hindered Ronsardian scholarship from tackling the section as a whole, or offering a serious definition of the Ronsardian 'poëme' since Krystyna Anktowiak's attempt to look at its formal features('A propos de la défintion du "poëme" chez Ronsard', in Ronsard en son IVe centenaire, vol. I, ed by Yvonne Bellenger and others (Geneva: Droz, 1988), pp. 47–52). Rouget's aim is paradoxically vaguer and more precise, uniting a study of the atmosphere of the 'poëme' with a careful rehistoricization of the genre. This erudite study, at the intersection of psycho-poetics, genetic, and the history of the book, follows up on the question of the definition of the 'poëme' raised by Rouget in his previous work (Ronsard et le livre II (Geneva: Droz, 2012)). The structure of this study defends a narrative in which the specificity [End Page 299] of the Poëmes claimed by Ronsard is revealed to be the result of the poet's wish to collect in one book all his previous poems placed under the sign of varietas. Thus, although the Poëmes are the centripetal focus of this study, Rouget discusses a range of Ronsardian 'minor' collections: in Chapters 2 and 3, the Livret des folastries (1553), Bocage (1554), Meslanges (1555-59), in Chapter 4 the Recueil des nouvelles poësies (1564), Elegies, mascarades et Bergerie (1565) before turning to the Poëmes (1560–69) in Chapters 5 and 6. The 'poëme' is placed within the broader aesthetic of the miscellany and Poliziano's silva underpinned by the concepts of varietas, 'poésie naturelle' and concordia discors. Rouget does not claim radical scholarly originality, but rather shows how the Poëmes correspond to a dynamic equilibrium within Ronsard's works, embodying a Horatian mediocritas or 'style moyen' which aspires to find balance while reclaiming an irretractable lacuna: 'Cette carence, nous croyons qu'elle est l'expression d'une imperfection assumée par Ronsard, et qu'elle souligne l'inachèvement du livre conçu comme une œuvre ouverte, régi par le principe d'inchoativité' (p. 25). Throughout the volume, the conceptual metaphor of the garden is used, building on the understanding of the 'poëme' as natural object, to clarify the long meanderings of Ronsard's corrections, and the deceptive impression of chaos. Rouget generously walks the reader step by step through the volume, describing the content of the collections and choosing selected extracts that are delightful to read. This fluid prose is peppered with creative analogies and distinctions (for example, between hybridity and heterogeneity) but unfortunately they are rarely fully explored. Moreover, the breadth of Rouget's scope makes his approach somewhat generalizing and the phrasing regrettably imprecise: emotions, for example, are approached in a loosely psycho-historic way but are rarely connected to the field of the history of emotions. Despite these minor issues, Rouget's study fills an important gap in Ronsardian scholarship by powerfully retracing the origins of the collection through the problematic and hybrid genre that is the French sixteenth-century 'poëme'. Alice Roullière Wadham College, Oxford Copyright © 2022 Modern Humanities Research Association