Ronsard’s guitar: A sixteenth-century heir to the Horatian lyre

Abstract

The string instruments lauded in Pierre de Ronsard’s odes to the lyre, lute, and guitar serve to exemplify the range of his poetic powers and scope of his professional aspirations. In “A sa lire”, the subject poses as a restorer of ancient instruments, asserting his precedence as an inventor of French odes after classical models and revealing his ambition to conquer the court with a renovated national poetry. In “A son luc,” he invests the contemporary string with the epic-making potential of the Pindaric lyre, the rby announcing his intention to compose a French national epic. In “A sa guiterre”, he associates the instrument with the Horatian lyre. The guitar thus represents the amotory voice that surfaces occasionally in the odes collection, intruding on the nobler endeavors to which the young poet sought to draw attention. The ode to the guitar heralds the canzoniere that would be Ronsard’s next major project and anticipates that his love poetry, rather than the odes or the projected epic, would prove a source of lasting fame.