Joachim du Bellay

Joachim du Bellay (1522–1560) was a French poet of the Pléiade, born in Anjou. His manifesto La Défense et illustration de la langue française (1549) argued that French could rival Latin and Italian, and he followed it with the sonnet sequence L'Olive. He spent some years in Rome in the service of his kinsman Cardinal Jean du Bellay, and returned to Paris in 1557.

His Roman years produced the Regrets and Les Antiquitez de Rome (1558), sonnets on the fallen grandeur of the ancient city; the related Songe (Dream) sequence closed the same volume. Edmund Spenser translated both as a young man, and printed them in his Complaints (1591) as Ruines of Rome and The Visions of Bellay. The versions here are Spenser's, in his own spelling.