Inheriting the poetry of the Renaissance: Tristan at the crossroads

Tristan the poet was a successor to the long period of the Renaissance that Malherbe wanted to put an end to by steering it toward a new kind of gentleness; this placed a threefold inheritance on his shoulders: from Malherbe, from the Renaissance, and, via the latter, from Antiquity. Like his contemporaries Théophile and Saint-Amant, Tristan thus intended to craft personal work at the crossroads of the influences of his predecessors, refusing the polemical stance toward the sixteenth century adopted by purists ranging from Guez de Balzac to Boileau.