Poetry
Jean de Sponde's youthful Amours comprise 26 sonnets in the manner of other love sonnet sequences of the period (as made fashionable by the members of La Pléiade). His posthumous collection also includes various other long lyric poems (stances), chansons and elegies.
Jean de Sponde's later poetry is impregnated with the major themes of the so-called French "baroque" poetry of the period and with the moral concerns of the huguenots. His poetry is often placed alongside the works of Agrippa d'Aubigné and Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas as the major poetic works of the French Renaissance Protestants.
His Essai de quelques poèmes chrétiens comprise 12 sonnets and three long lyric poems (two on the last supper and one on death). Sponde's writing paints the massiveness of the world, man's tortured destiny, and his lack of clarity. The author is obsessed with inconstancy, masks, appearances, and death, and this presence of death in the midst of man's life inspires man to seek eternity and to reach out to god.
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Famous quotes containing the word poetry:
“Poetry, and Picture, are Arts of a like nature; and both are busie about imitation. It was excellently said of Plutarch, Poetry was a speaking Picture, and Picture a mute Poesie. For they both invent, faine, and devise many things, and accommodate all they invent to the use, and service of nature. Yet of the two, the Pen is more noble, than the Pencill. For that can speake to the Understanding; the other, but to the Sense.”
—Ben Jonson (1573–1637)
“There is only beauty—and it has only one perfect expression—Poetry. All the rest is a lie—except for those who live by the body, love, and, that love of the mind, friendship.... For me, Poetry takes the place of love, because it is enamored of itself, and because its sensual delight falls back deliciously in my soul.”
—Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898)
“There is no gilding of setting sun or glamor of poetry to light up the ferocious and endless toil of the farmers’ wives.”
—Hamlin Garland (1860–1940)