“Because beauty consists of round forms” The shifting geometry of the heavens in Renaissance poetry

Playing on the cosmological and philosophical associations between roundness and perfection, Ronsard, Peletier du Mans, and even Guy Lefèvre de la Boderie employ a host of geometric images in their figuring of beauty. Beyond the poetics of the bel objet (fair object), the lexical and figurative logic that they develop forms, according to their respective imaginaries, a two- or three-dimensional verbal geometry through the interaction of poetic and mathematical languages.