But
he has the ambition not only of being a courtier and a lover, but a
great scholar also; he is anxious about orthography, about the letter e
Grecque, the true spelling of Latin names in French writing, and the
restoration of the letter i to its primitive liberty--del' i voyelle en
sa premiere liberte. His poetry is full of quaint, remote learning. He
is just a little pedantic, true always to his own express judgment, that
to be natural is not enough for one who in poetry desires to produce
work worthy of immortality. And therewithal a certain number of Greek
words, which charmed Ronsard and his circle by their gaiety and
daintiness, and a certain air of foreign elegance about them, crept into
the French language: and there were other strange words which the poets
of the Pleiad forged for themselves, and which had only an ephemeral
existence.
With this was mixed the desire to taste a more exquisite and various
music than that of the older French verse, or of the classical poets.
The music of the measured, scanned verse of Latin and Greek poetry is
one thing; the music of the rhymed, unscanned verse of Villon and the
old French poets, la poesie chantee, is another.
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