SOURCE: "Ronsard's Bacchic Poetry: From the Bacchanales to the Hymne de l'autonne," in L'Esprit Créateur, Vol. X, No. 2, Summer, 1970, pp. 104-16.

An English scholar of French Renaissance literature, Cave is the author of Devotional Poetry in France (1969) and The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (1979). In the essay below, he traces the development of Ronsard's interpretation of the myth of Bacchus by examining the poems "Bacchanales," "Dithyrambes," "Hymne de l'autonne," and "Hinne de Bacus."

The interest in Bacchus, wine and drunkenness which is prominent in Ronsard's earlier poetry is most fully worked out in three major poems published in successive years: the "Bacchanales" (1552), the "Dithyrambes" (1553), and the "Hinne de Bacus" (1554). The connections between these poems are far from casual. The first two celebrate the well-known fêtes organised by Ronsard and his colleagues, the picnic-party in honour of Dorat and the "pompe du bouc...