Joachim du Bellay

Joachim du Bellay (about 1522 to 1 January 1560) was a French poet, critic and a founder of La Pléiade, the circle of Renaissance poets around Pierre de Ronsard. He wrote the group manifesto, Défense et illustration de la langue française of 1549, which argued that French could be made an artistic language equal to Greek and Latin through imitation of the ancients and careful borrowing from Italian, Latin and Greek. Born at the castle of La Turmelière near Angers and orphaned young, he studied law at Poitiers, where he came into contact with the humanist Marc Antoine Muret, and met Ronsard around 1547, after which he joined the students of Jean Dorat at the Collège de Coqueret in Paris. More of a Latinist than his friends, he favoured a national and familiar note in his poetry, and his manifesto was both a complement and a refutation of Thomas Sébillet's earlier treatise on poetics.