Writing In Exile: Joachim Du Bellay, Rome And Renaissance France

Abstract

In his essay of 1872 on Joachim Du Bellay the aesthetic critic, and Oxford Classics don Walter Pater wrote of the French Renaissance poet's journey to Rome and celebrated stay there in the service of his kinsman the Cardinal Jean Du Bellay. Of the French poets who visited Rome and used their presence in the Eternal City as matter for their writing, Du Bellay was easily the foremost and probably the most subtle. The contrast between the circular epic of Homer's Odysseus and the linear narrative of Dante's Ulysses has been illuminatingly explored by John Freccero, as indeed it was noted in the Renaissance by Dante's commentator, Christoforo Landino. In fact, Du Bellay's persona of French-poet-exiled-to-Rome is presented as caught imaginatively not just between exile and home but also, more fundamentally, between two contradictory conceptions of exile itself and so also of patria . Keywords: Dante's Ulysses; French renaissance; Homer's Odysseus; Joachim Du Bellay; Ovidian exile; Rome; Walter Pater