Is Poetry a Disease of the Brain, as Alfred de Vigny Said?

Except for the ode titled Des beautez qu’il voudroit en S’Amie printed on the verso of page 79 of Jacques Peletier’s (1517–1582) Oeuvres poetiques (Peletier, 1547), the very first book published by French poet Pierre de Ronsard (1524–1585) was an epithalam (Ronsard, 1549). Forty-six years later, the first printing of Edmund Spenser’s (1552–1599) Epithalamion appeared (Spenser, 1595), and it was rightly regarded as a landmark in Elizabethan literature.