SOURCE: Schwartz, Jerome. “The Poet In Bivio: Du Bellay's Spiritual Itinerary in Les Regrets.” In Lapidary Inscriptions: Renaissance Essays For Donald A. Stone, Jr. edited by Barbara C. Bowen and Jerry C. Nash, pp. 61-71, Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1994.

In this essay, Schwartz studies the allegorical and mythical aspects of two of Du Bellay's works.

Critical response to the Regrets has typically been praise of the small number of masterpieces in the collection, emphasis on the elegiac and satirical poems and neglect of the final 60 sonnets of praise for the French monarchy. A characteristic assessment is Thomas M. Greene's remark that, compared with the greatness of the Antiquitez de Rome, Du Bellay's “aspiration in the Regrets will fall short of poetry's noblest and most proper goals; they rise no higher than a versified journal.”¹ Such a negative evaluation of the Regrets fails to account adequately for the mythic...