SOURCE: Bizer, Mark. “Letters from Home: The Epistolary Aspects of Joachim Du Bellay's Les Regrets.” Renaissance Quarterly 52 (1999): 140-175.

In the essay which follows, Bizer argues that Du Bellay's Les Regrets is a product of humanist tradition.

Les Regrets, a collection of sonnets composed by the poet Joachim Du Bellay during a four-year stay in Rome from 1553 to 1557, while he served as secretary and intendant to his second cousin, Cardinal Jean Du Bellay, gives expression to a paradox. It constitutes a poetry of exile, in which Du Bellay mercilessly dissects Roman society and yearns to return to his native France. At the same time, however, Rome was home for a humanist such as Du Bellay; for once in the eternal city, he had in a sense returned to his intellectual and cultural heritage, although it was fragmented, incomplete, and in ruins. This simultaneous estrangement and familiarity is played out...