Ronsard and His Mirrors in the Amours (1552)

This article examines several sonnets from Ronsard’s Amours in the context of Jean Frappier’s claim that the theme of mirrors saw a kind of “progression in terms of introspection” among love poets between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. Through the analysis of various specular poems, we will see that this is not the case with Ronsard, and that his poetics differs from that of his predecessors (Ovid, Petrarch, Scève), even though his verses sometimes seem to echo theirs.