RONSARD: His Life and Times

The biography of a 16th century French poet by an English critic, a well-known authority on the Renaissance. In a racy yet flowery style, Mr. Lewis interprets and rhapsodizes the genius of his favorite Renaissance poet ""save Shakespeare"", to an audience he assumes to be Philistine. Dividing his analysis into seven sections, the seven loves of Ronsard to whom the poet's works are dedicated, the organization of the book gets rather involved in the inclusion of sections of pure aesthetic appreciation of the poetry and an attempt to interpret the literary Renaissance as a whole at the same time. Yet, though the subject would seem to limit it to a purely literary market, Mr. Lewis' analysis of the Renaissance as in many ways limiting a philosophy of the Middle Ages which it superseded, is interesting and revealing. Libraries and schools provide the chief market.