Joachim du Bellay

Joachim du Bellay (Liré, Anjou, c. 1522 - Paris, 1 January 1560) was a French poet and critic and one of the founders of La Pléiade, the group that renewed French poetry during the Renaissance. His main importance lies in arguing that French, a vernacular language next to Latin, could reach the literary standing of the classical tongues.

He was born at the Château de La Turmelière, into a family of old nobility. Orphaned as a child, he was raised under the guardianship of an elder brother who paid little attention to his schooling. Somewhat later he began to study law at the University of Poitiers, where he met humanists and, around 1547, Pierre de Ronsard, with whom he formed a decisive friendship. The two then moved to the Collège de Coqueret in Paris to study under the Hellenist Jean Dorat, and it was in that circle that the group later known as La Pléiade took shape.

In 1549 he published the Defence and Illustration of the French Language, the group's manifesto. It urged writers to enrich French with words from regional dialects and with learned borrowings from Greek and Latin, to imitate the ancients and Petrarch, and to create new poetic forms such as the sonnet and the ode. The text provoked angry replies from defenders of the older tradition associated with Marot. That same year saw the publication of L'Olive, a sequence of love sonnets in the manner of Petrarch and considered the first of its kind in French. Du Bellay did not introduce the sonnet to France, but he helped establish it, and when the fashion grew excessive he was among the first to mock its excesses.

Between 1553 and 1557 he lived in Rome as secretary to his kinsman, Cardinal Jean du Bellay. It was a duty more than a pleasure, since he had to deal with creditors and raise funds for the household. There he wrote the sonnets of The Antiquities of Rome and Regrets, both published in 1558. These poems are more personal and less imitative, setting the grandeur of the ruined city against his longing for his homeland by the Loire. In Rome he also fell in love with a woman he calls Columba, a passion that left its mark on his Latin poems.

He returned to Paris in 1557, and his publications brought him some standing in the city's intellectual life. He died suddenly on the night of 1 January 1560, aged 37. His legacy rests on the argument that French deserved a literature of its own and on his Roman sonnets, which anticipated a sensibility later taken up by writers such as Volney and Chateaubriand. His work was also rendered into English by Edmund Spenser and into Spanish by Francisco de Quevedo.