4 Shakespeare and Ronsard

The young Ronsard, as I have already remarked, in the course of his truly Stakanovitish labours in the service of that great Five Year Plan to raise what I suppose would now be called the ‘productivity’ of French poetry to a level with that of the ancients, not only imitated almost everything that any ancient poet had ever said about the enduringness of poetry, but also, and often in a quite breath-taking manner, spoke of his own poetry and his own immortality much as Pindar, Horace and the rest had spoken of theirs. Thus, at the end of the Fourth Book of his Odes, published in 1550 when he was twenty-five, he inserted a kind of epilogue A sa Muse (later transferred to the end of the Fifth Book when, by the addition of that, he had overtopped Horace's four-book monument), beginning Plus dur que fer, j'ai fini mon ouvrage; ¹ and in the ode De l'Election de son Sepulchre he declared that the shepherds would visit every year his tomb on an island in the Loire and would exclaim: Que tu es renommée D'estre tumbeau nommée D'un de qui l'univers Ouira [later: chante] les vers ¹ —