SOURCE: “The Tribulations of a Young Poet: Ronsard from 1547 to 1552,” in Renaissance Rereadings: Intertext and Context, pp. 184-202. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.

In the following essay, Desan recounts Ronsard's early attempts to make a living as a poet.

The poet has always been accorded a status well set off from that of other members of society. Poetic production and everyday necessities coexist only with difficulty, for the Muses' elect would seem to have other preoccupations than imagining themselves members of a civil and industrious society. The spirituality of poetry transcending material needs, the poet would subsist merely on rhymes and sparkling water, or even, as with Celadon in L'Astrée, on “cress and tears”; his always-gratuitous production would demand no real work. The image that we have of the poet is that of a demigod blackening pages of a book under the impulse of genius—no trace...