SOURCE: "Ronsard's Early Elegies: 1553 to 1563," in Love Elegies of the Renaissance: Marot, Louise Labé and Ronsard, ANMA LIBRI, 1979, pp. 73-95.

In the following excerpt, Hanisch discusses the defining characteristics of Ronsard's early elegies.

In the first posthumous edition of Ronsard's works, published in 1587, the book of Elegies was preceded by a quotation from Horace's Ars Poetica regarding the elegy and by two prefaces, both of which are of interest to us. The first shows the confusion which Ronsard evidently felt regarding the nature of the elegy and ends with a translation of two lines taken from Horace….

In her study of Ronsard's elegies [Le Genre élégiaque dans l'oeuvre de Ronsard, 1939], Dora Elisabeth Frey states her belief that this preface may be apocryphal, a creation of Ronsard's literary executors Jean Galland and Claude Binet, who published the first posthumous edition of his works, to which was added Binet's...