Clement Marot
Clément Marot (1496–1544), was a major French poet of the Renaissance period who is often viewed as being the most important poet of his period because his work bridges the medieval poetry of his forbears the Rhétoriqueurs and the latter Renaissance poetry of the movement known as La Pléiade. Much of the medieval poetry of Marot's time was extraordinarily abstruse, written in archaic language in complex forms that left meaning almost entirely obscure. Although Marot mastered this complex style and wrote a number of excellent poems in imitation of it, he would eventually completely reject the obscurity and complexity of his forebears and devise an entirely new style of French poetry focussed on vernacular language and simple yet elegant formal techniques. Marot was greatly influenced by his studies of the French poet Francois Villon (whose works Marot edited, collected and published) as well as by the Latin classics—particularly the poetry of Virgil, Ovid, and Horace, which he translated into French. Among Marot's most critically acclaimed works are his verse translations of the Psalms which, according to some, directly influenced the cause of Protestanism in 16th-century France. Marot is also particularly well-known for the blason, a poetic form he invented which involves the meticulous description of an ordinary, minute thing, which some have praised as a precursor to the Imagism of the 20th-century moderns. Although Marot was overshadowed for many centuries by his immediate succesors, the poets of La Pléiade, he has within the last hundred years returned to the limelight, and many now agree that Marot is the first poet of the French Renaissance.
Biography
Marot was born at Cahors, the capital of the province of Quercy, some time during the winter of 1496-1497. His father, Jean Marot (c. 1463-1523) was a Norman from the Caen region and was himself a poet of considerable merit. Jean held the post of escripvain, or poet-historian, to Anne of Brittany. He had lived in Cahors for a considerable time, and twice married there, his second wife being the mother of Clement. The boy was brought into France in 1506. He appears to have been educated at the University of Paris, and to have then begun studying law. Jean Marot took great pains to instruct his son in the fashionable forms of verse-making, which called for some formal training.
It was the time of the Rhétoriqueurs, poets who combined stilted and pedantic language with an obstinate adherence to the allegorical manner of the Medieval Ages and to the most complicated and artificial forms of the ballade and the rondeau. Clément practised this form of poetry, which he would later help overthrow. He began translating Virgil in 1512. He soon gave up the study of law and became page to Nicolas de Neuville, which led to his introduction into court life.
As early as 1514, before the accession of Francis I, Clément presented to him his Judgment of Minos, and shortly afterwards he was either styled or styled himself "poet of the reign" to Queen Claude. In 1519 he was attached to the suite of Marguerite d'Angoulême, the king's sister, a great patron of the arts. He was also a great favourite of Francis himself, attended the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520, and duly celebrated it in verse. In the next year he was at the battlefield in Flanders, and wrote of the horrors of war.
In 1524, Marot accompanied Francis on his disastrous Italian campaign. He was wounded and taken prisoner at the Battle of Pavia, but soon released, and was back in Paris again by the beginning of 1525. While Marot was away, however, formidable opposition to intellectual and literary innovation now began to manifest themselves at court, and Marot, never particularly prudent, was arrested on a charge of heresy and lodged in the Châtelet in February 1526. The imprisonment caused him to write a vigorous poem entitled L'Enfer (Hell). His father died about this time, and Marot seems to have been appointed in Jean's place as servant to the king. In 1530, he married. The following year he was once again in trouble, this time for attempting to rescue a prisoner, and was again released.
In 1532 he published, under the title of Adolescence Clémentine, the first printed collection of his works, which was very popular and was frequently reprinted with additions. Dolet's edition of 1538 is believed to be the most authoritative. Unfortunately, the poet's enemies, not discouraged by their previous failures, ensured that Marot was implicated in the scandalous 1534 Affair of the Placards, and this time Marot was forced into exile. He made his way to Renée, Duchess of Ferrara, a supporter of the French Protestant Reformation. At Ferrara Marot's work included the celebrated Blasons (a descriptive poem focussing upon minute detail, a form devised by Marot), which set all the verse-writers of France imitating him. The blason form proved so popular that an anthology of blasons written by Marot's followers had been assembled as soon as 1543 with the title of Blasons anatomiques du corps féminin.
Duchess Renée was not able to persuade her husband to share her views, and Marot had to leave Ferrara. He went to Venice, but before very long Pope Paul III remonstrated with Francis I on the severity with which the Protestants were treated, and they were allowed to return to Paris on condition of recanting their errors. Marot returned with the rest, and abjured his heresy at Lyon.
It was at this time that his famous translations of the Psalms appeared. The powerful influence which the book exercised on contemporaries is universally acknowledged. They were sung in the court and in the city, and they are said, probably with some exaggeration, to have done more than anything else to advance the cause of the Reformation in France.
The publication of the Psalms gave the Sorbonne the opportunity to condemn Marot. In 1543 it was evident that he could not rely on the protection of Francis. Marot accordingly fled to Geneva; but the stars were now decidedly against him. He had, like most of his friends, been at least as much of a freethinker as a Protestant, and this was fatal to his reputation in the Calvinistic land of Geneva. He again had to flee, and made his way into Italy, where he died at Turin in the autumn of 1544.
Character
In character Marot seems to have been a typical Frenchman of the old stamp, cheerful, good-humoured and amiable enough, but probably not very much disposed to serious reflection. With other poets like Mellin de Saint-Gelais and Brodeau, with prose writers like Rabelais and Bonaventure des Périers, he was always on excellent terms. And whatever may have been his personal weaknesses, his importance in the history of French literature is very great, and has been long undervalued. Coming immediately before a great literary reform—that of the Pléiade—Marot suffered the drawbacks of his position; he was both eclipsed and decried by the partakers in that reform.
Marot was not simply a "poet of transition" who only established the basis for future generations. He himself was a radical reformer, and he carried his own reform—both in poetry and in thought—as far as it would go. His early work was couched in the rhétoriqueur style, the distinguishing characteristics of which are elaborate metre and rhyme, allegoric matter and pedantic language. In his second stage he entirely emancipated himself from this, and became one of the easiest, least affected and most vernacular poets of France. In these points indeed he has, with the exception of La Fontaine, no rival, and the lighter verse-writers ever since have taken one or the other or both as model.
In his third period he lost a little of this flowing grace and ease, but acquired something in stateliness, while he certainly lost nothing in wit. Marot is the first poet who strikes readers of French as being distinctively modern. He is not so great a poet as Villon nor as some of his successors of the Pléiade, but he is much less antiquated than the first and not so elaborately artificial as the second. Indeed if there be a fault to find with Marot, it is undoubtedly that in his gallant and successful effort to break up the stiff forms and stiffer language of the 15th century, he made his poetry almost too vernacular and pedestrian. He has passion, and picturesqueness, but only rarely; and while the style Marotique was supreme, French poetry ran some risk of finding itself unequal to anything but graceful vers de société.
Reference
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
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