Jacques Pelletier du Mans’s knowledge and love…
1555 CE
Jacques Pelletier du Mans’s knowledge and love of Greek and Latin poetry is a strong influence on the group of French poetry reformers known as La Pléiade.
In the preface to his translation of Horace's Ars Poetica (1545) and in his Art poétique française (1555; “French Poetic Art”), the poet and critic has put forward his own program for the reform of French poetry.
He insists that poets must imitate the classics if French literature was to rise to great heights.
In addition to lyric poetry, Pelletier has written major works on mathematics and the reform of French spelling (which in the Renaissance had, through a misguided attempt to model French words on their Latin roots, acquired many inconsistencies) in his treatise (1550) advocating a phonetic-based spelling using new typographic signs, which Pelletier will continue to use in all his published works (because of this system, "Peletier" is consistently spelled with one "l").