The birth of elegy in France, 1500-1550

Abstract

When Clement Marot gave the title Elegies to a group of poems published in the Suite de l'Adolescence Clementine, in 1532, he was the first poet to give this title to a poem, or poems in French. Marot's first group of Elegies were in fact quite simply love epistles, and in order to study the birth of the Elegy in France, we have therefore studied the origins of the --Epitre Amoureuse, and its growth in popularity from 1500, until Marot's creation of the Elegie. We have shown how the love epistle owed its wide diffusion to the influence of Ovid's Heroides, and more particularly Octovien de Saint-Gelais' translation of them, Les XXI Epistres d'Ovide. We have further shown that although Ovid's influence was decisive in the creation of the genre, Marot himself does not imitate him textually to a large extent, nor does he imitate (as has sometimes been claimed) Tibullus and Propertius. We have shown how Marot draws largely from the traditions of mediaeval love poetry for the genre which he chose to give a title used by the authors of Antiquity. We have studied the various elegies written up until 1550, since however arbitrary this date may be, it does mark a certain break between the ascendancy of Marot and his imitators, and the Pleiade. We have shown how, although the various poets who wrote elegies in the period between the creation of Marot's elegies and 1550, were undoubtedly influenced by Marot in their adoption of the genre, there is a large degree of difference in the way each individual poet interpreted the genre. Nevertheless, as we have shown very briefly in the Conclusion, the pattern that Marot created was in fact a durable one, which had a certain influence even up to the end of the century.