La Pléiade

La Pléiade is a circle of seven French poets of the Renaissance (mid-sixteenth century) united by a program for the renewal of the national poetry on the basis of imitating ancient and Italian models. Its leading figures were Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay, author of the manifesto The Defence and Illustration of the French Language (1549), which proclaimed the vernacular's right to high poetry on a par with Latin. La Pléiade enriched French lyric with the forms of the sonnet, ode, and elegy, developed a theory of poetic language, and affirmed the figure of the poet-creator. The activity of La Pléiade had a pan-European significance as a model of the conscious creation of a high-style national literature on the basis of the native tongue — a process consonant with the later efforts of many peoples, the Ukrainian among them, to affirm the full-fledged standing of their language in letters.