SOURCE: "Demons, Portents, and Visions: Fantastic and Supernatural Elements in Ronsard's Poetry," in Renaissance Rereadings: Intertext and Context, Maryanne Cline Horowitz, Anne J. Cruz, and Wendy A. Furman, eds., University of Illinois Press, 1988, pp. 225-35.

For anyone who is familiar with much of the recent criticism devoted to le fantastique, the idea of viewing certain poetic texts of Ronsard as examples of this genre might well seem preposterous, anachronistic—indeed fantastic! First of all, Todorov, in his perceptive Introduction à la littérature fantastique, seems to preclude any such possibility when he states categorically: "We see now why the poetic reading constitutes a danger for the fantastic. If as we read a text we reject all representation, considering each sentence as a pure semantic combination, the fantastic could not appear … the fantastic can subsist only within fiction: poetry cannot be fantastic."

A second problem confronting anyone rash enough to...