Jean-Antoine de Baïf

French poet and critic Joachim du Bellay, along with his contemporary, the poet Pierre de Ronsard, studies classical literature in Paris under Jean Daurat, the famous Hellenist and Latinist.

The meeting, in 1547, of du Bellay and Ronsard in an inn on the way to Poitiers may justly be regarded as the starting-point of the French school of Renaissance poetry.

The core group of the Renaissance "Pléiade"—Ronsard, du Bellay and Jean-Antoine de Baïf—has come together at the Collège de Coqueret under the tutelage of Daurat; they are generally called the "Brigade.” Du Bellay is twenty-seven years old in 1549 when he publishes the group’s celebrated manifesto: the nationalistic Defense et illustration de la langue francoyse, a plea for the enrichment of the French language to insure its parity with ancient tongues, calling for new French poetry based on classical models.

French humanist Jean Dorat, a brilliant Hellenist, one of the poets of the Pléiade, and their mentor for many years, belongs to a noble family; after studying at the Collège de Limoges, he had become tutor to the pages of Francis I.

He had tutored Jean-Antoine de Baïf, whose father he succeeded as director of the Collège de Coqueret.

There, besides Baïf, his pupils had included Pierre de Ronsard, Rémy Belleau, and Pontus de Tyard.

Joachim du Bellay was added to this group by Ronsard, and these five young poets, along with and under the direction of Dorat, formed a society for the reform of French language and literature.

They had increased their number to seven with the dramatist Étienne Jodelle and named themselves La Pléiade, in emulation of the seven Greek poets of Alexandria.

The election of Dorat as their president proved his personal influence, but as a writer of French verse he is the least important of the seven.

Dorat had stimulated his students to intensive study of Greek and Latin poetry, while he himself writes incessantly in both languages.

He is said to have composed more than fifteen thousand Greek and Latin verses.

His influence and fame as a scholar extends to England, Italy, and Germany.

He had in 1556 been appointed professor of Greek at the Collège Royal, a post that he had held until he retired in 1567.

He publishes a collection of the best of his Greek and Latin verse in 1586.

Baïf, the most learned of the seven, had received a classical education and in 1547 had gone with Ronsard to study under Dorat where they planned, with du Bellay, to transform French poetry by imitating the ancients and the Italians.

To this program Baïf had contributed two collections of Petrarchan sonnets and Epicurean lyrics, Les Amours de Méline (1552) and L'Amour de Francine (1555).

Le Brave, ou Taillebras, Baïf's lively adaptation of Plautus' Miles gloriosus, had been played at court and published in 1567.

Baïf—who was the natural son of Lazare de Baïf, humanist and diplomat—has enjoyed royal favor and received pensions and benefices from Charles IX and Henry III.

His Euvres en rime (1573; “Works in Rhyme”) reveal great erudition: Greek (especially Alexandrian), Latin, neo-Latin, and Italian models are imitated for mythological poems, eclogues, epigrams, and sonnets.

His verse translations include Terence's Eunuchus and Sophocles' Antigone.

Baïf is a versatile, inventive poet and experimenter who, for example, has invented and made use of a system of phonetic spelling.

With the musician Thibault de Courville, Baïf had founded a short-lived Academy of Poetry and of Music in order to promote certain Platonic theories on the union of poetry and music.

His metrical inventions include a vers baïfin, a verse of fifteen syllables.

His theories had been exemplified in Etrénes de poezie fransoèze en vers mezurés (1574; “Gifts of French Poetry in Quantitative Verse”) and in his little songs, Chansonnettes mesurées (1586), with music written by Jacques Mauduit.

His Mimes, enseignements et proverbes (1576; “Mimes, Lessons, and Proverbs”) is considered to be his most original work.

A personal poet whose gifts are inferior to his genius for invention of form and language, Baïf has a talent for vivid, realistic description, particularly in scenes of country life and in satire.