Joachim du Bellay (1522-60) remains a cornerstone of the French literary tradition. In this monumental bilingual edition Richard Helgerson collects The Regrets and The Antiquities of Rome, two
sonnet sequences du Bellay wrote during the more than four years he spent in Rome and published immediately on his return to France in 1558, along with three Latin elegies also written in Rome,
and The Defense and Enrichment of the French Language, his earlier manifesto for the new poetry he and his friend Pierre de Ronsard were then about to launch. The Regrets is an account of du
Bellay’s stay at the papal court. The Antiquities is also concerned with Rome, but in every different way: not as a quotidian record of the poet’s experience of the modern city but as a
profound meditation on the ruin of an ancient empire.
In imitation of Petrarch, sonnet sequences were a prime marker of the new poetry all over Europe. But there are no other sequences like du Bellay’s, none that leave love aside and express such
a varied range of emotions and ideas.
