In poetic responses to the French civil wars, the wounded political body
of France is aligned with the ravaged body of the physical landscape in
an array of arresting ecological images. By tracing a web of profoundly
imbricated commonplaces and analogies concerning fields, bodies, and
entrails in particular, this chapter investigates the ways in which the
verse of Pierre de Ronsard and Agrippa d’Aubigné both rehearses and
decries the unnatural twists and turns of that ‘intestine’ conflict. Both
poets revive ancient expressions of ecological anxiety that disrupt what
Timothy Morton has termed ‘agrilogistic thought’; but I argue that in
their distinctive and sometimes challenging styles, their verse presents
(and through syntactic violence, uncannily performs) a still more radical
vision of human enmeshment in nature.
Platonism in French Renaissance Poetry