Maurice Scève

Maurice Scève , born towards 1501 with Lyon and died towards 1564, was a Poète French 16th century. He is the author of Delie, object moreover haulte virtue .

Biography

Maurice Scève is the leader of what it was a long time agreed to call the “Lyons École”, even if no proclamation, no collective theoretical publication clarifying this magistère and the homogeneity of a group welded around him come to justify the expression. Resulting from an upper middle-class and which have well-established (his/her father is judge-magus, its Guillaume brother is humanistic famous), he attends early artists and men of letters, like Marot, Etienne Dolet, Charles of Holy-Marthe. Its scholarship, its very sure artistic direction and its prestige in the capital of Gaules of the years 1540 will make it designate as principal organizer of the solemn entry of Henri II in September 1548. It does not seem therefore to have cultivated the honors, but multiplies on the contrary the solitary retirements, almost never signs its works, and disappears without leaving traces after 1560.

Works

A rich and diversified inspiration

Maurice Scève acquires his poetic fame by gaining the contest of the Blasons, launched by Clément Marot in 1535, thanks to his “blazon of the eyebrow”. Humanistic impassioned by the Antiquity and the Italy, its work is placed under the influence of Plato and Pétrarque (he will claim besides, in 1533, to have found in Avignon the tomb of Laure, the inspirer of the Canzoniere ). Its sources are however more varied than it does not appear to with it: beyond Marot, which is to some extent its impossible to circumvent elder, and which is already famous when does to him nothing but begin, it remembers the techniques of writing virtuosos of the Grands Rhetoriqueurs, of the density of the poets of the Dolce stil novo and Dante, themselves heirs to the Troubadour S knowing crypter the name of their Lady. Its poetry convenes also many reasons and biblical accounts: this culture a long time was underestimated, but is corroborated at the same time by its translations of many psalms, and by the metaphysical epopee of its last work, Microcosme , which récrit human history since Creation. (Albert-Marie Schmidt however says to be herself a little less astonished by the extent of the knowledge implemented in this poem when he realized that Scève had made loans with the Margarita Philosophica of the German Gregor Reisch.)

Unties, object moreover haulte virtue

Its major work was published quasi anonymously (portrait and initial of the author only) in 1544. Délie is dedicated to a loved woman of an impossible love, a long time identified with its young pupil Pernette of Guillet, without that being proven. It is a long collection of 449 Dizain S in Décasyllabe S, separate between them by 50 “emblems” made up of an engraving, on mythological or familiar subject surrounded by a motto , i.e. the currency which it illustrates and of a framework to the variable geometrical form. These “emblems” each time give its topic to the first of the series of 9 ten-line stanzas.

The writing of Scève, between elliptic formulas, culture of ambiguity and diverting scholarship, is at the same time greeted by a minority of amateurs of " rich person invention" (Thomas Sébillet, François Habert), and criticized by a majority of hostile contemporaries to this Hermetism (Charles Fontaine, Jacques Furrier of Mans, and to a certain extent leaders of the Pleiad (XVIe century)). Nowadays, this hermetism tends, contrary, with becoming the mark of a “pure poetry” which would bring Maurice Scève closer to the Symbolists and of Mallarmé. Between the two periods, it is initially the Classicisme, and its taste for famous the " clarté" , then the Romanticism, and its propensity with épanchement lyric, which successively maintained Scève in the lapse of memory.

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