SOURCE: “Poetic License, Censorship and the Unrestrained Self: Ronsard's Livret de folastries,” in Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, Vol. XXIII, No. 45, 1996, pp. 449-62.

In the following essay, Randall describes the trangressive and pornographic qualities of Ronsard's Livret de folastries.

I. Making Free with the Text: Ronsard, La Fontaine and a Voice from Vice

One of the ways in which freedom of expression can be measured is through an examination of poetic license taken. “Poetic license” implies a censoring body, one overseeing the norms of expression. When censorship is ignored, or when limits are stretched, usually consciously (since poetry's very idiom—its formalism—renders an unconscious violation of norms fairly inconceivable), a politics develops and is demonstrated in that verse. This poetic politics mandates as privileged “licensing agency” the self, rather than the state.

In mid-sixteenth century France, while censorship was not explicitly codified, the standard of the...