ABSTRACT
Joachim du Bellay was a French poet and a founder of the Pléiade, a circle of sixteenth-century French poets. One of his principal works is a collection of sonnets entitled L’Olive, printed in 1549 and 1550. The poems, inspired by the literary works of the early Renaissance Italian poet Petrarch, praise an unidentified and probably imaginary lover. His later work Les Regrets were written during a later trip to Rome in the 1550s and express a melancholic longing for one’s homeland.
