Jean-Antoine de Baïf

Jean-Antoine de Baïf (Venice, 1532 – Paris, 1589) was a French poet and a member of the Pléiade, the circle of writers who sought in sixteenth-century France to enrich the French language and its poetry by drawing on Greek and Latin models. He wrote in French, but his training was thoroughly humanist. His significance lies more in his reform projects than in the uneven quality of his output.

He was born in Venice, the natural son of the humanist Lazare de Baïf, then French ambassador there. His father took great care over his education. He learned Latin from Charles Estienne and Greek from Ange Vergèce, and later studied under Jean Dorat, the same teacher who trained Ronsard, who was eight years older. According to a well-known account, Baïf helped Ronsard with the first steps of Greek, while Ronsard introduced him to the craft of French versification.

His output was enormous and uneven. He wrote many short poems, mostly on love or on occasions of congratulation, and translated or paraphrased authors such as Theocritus, Anacreon, Catullus and Martial. He wanted to fit classical verse into French, measuring lines by the quantity of long and short vowels rather than by counting syllables, and he also proposed a phonetic spelling. In 1570, with the composer Joachim Thibault de Courville and with royal support, he founded the Académie de Poésie et de Musique. Its concerts at his Paris house were attended by Charles IX and Henry III.

His legacy is mainly historical. His experiments with measured verse fed debates about the relation between music and poetry, and musicians such as Claude Le Jeune joined his circle. Today he is remembered less for his verse than as an example of the Renaissance ambition to reinvent a national language.