L'École des muses: les arts poétiques français à la Renaissance (1548-1610). Sébillet, Du Bellay, Peletier et les autres (review)

This careful study of the art poétique as genre, from Sébillet's Art poetique françois (1548) to Deimier's Académie de l'art poétique (1610), seems somewhat redundant, as the author concedes, given the wealth of recent editions of, and commentaries on, French poetics of the sixteenth century. However, there are several distinctive and meritorious aspects to Monferran's approach: an awareness of the specificity of this production of poetic theory (in relation to what precedes and to what follows); an awareness of the limited scope of poetic theory (poetics does not encompass all that happens in poetry of the time, either in the nature of the poem itself or in its linguistic or dialectal extension); a constant awareness of developments in the poetics of lyric in Italy; a focus on the importance of Horace (for better or for worse) in the emergence of a poetic consciousness in France; and a demonstration of the influence of the still underappreciated Sébillet. Between the middle of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, French poets became less tied to pedagogical and practical exigencies. They promoted a connection between a national literature and the French language (to the detriment of Latin and of provincial poetry), and they offered the possibility of combining the writing of poetry at the highest level with theoretical reflection on the poetry. In other words, inspiration was not, for a short period of sixty years, incompatible with analysis. The seventeenth century witnessed a regression, in terms of the lyric, and a massive shift of theoretical reflection to the epic and, above all, to theatre. Monferran meticulously reviews all of the sixteenth-century French treatises on poetics, following the criteria of definition of the object of the 'art' of poetry, the organization of the treatise itself, and the forms and styles used in writing the treatise. He concludes by tracing the development of systematic, 'grammatical', or dictionary-like presentation towards the end of the century. While his analysis is always intelligent and informed, one would have wished that Monferran had complemented his study with more suggestions (although, to be fair, there are some) of what the arts poétiques lacked in terms of actual poetry written: to what extent were the poets blind to, or insufficiently aware of, developments in poetry itself, written by themselves or by their contemporaries? That being said, this study is certainly a welcome and reliable guide to what is indeed a genre and not simply a collection of occasional musings or prefabricated technical manuals.