“Je sens dedans mon âme une guerre civile” Writing about oneself at the end of the Renaissance

The civil wars which France suffered in the last decades of the 16th century disrupted the imagination of the lyric poetry of the Pleiad. The era of the " self " which exalted personal balance is no more. Writers henceforth experienced civil violence. This violence is transposed into love poetry and religious poetry in the form of tension and morbid ideas. Tormented and powerless in the midst of the vicissitudes of their time, some of them break with the exterior to reconnect with themselves.