He was a contemporary of Ronsard, and his first essays were published when the innovations of the Pleiade had fully established themselves.
There too he probably met Jacques Peletier du Mans, who had published a translation of the Ars poetica of Horace, with a preface in which much of the programme advocated later by the Pleiade is to be found in outline.
This book was the expression of the literary principles of the Pleiade as a whole, but although Ronsard was the chosen leader, its redaction was entrusted to du Bellay.
To obtain a clear view of the reforms aimed at by the Pleiade, the Deffence should be further considered in connexion with Ronsard's Abrege d'art poetique and his preface to the Franciade.
The most famous of all modern Belgian writers, Maurice Maeterlinck, made his debut in a Parisian journal, the Pleiade, in 1886.
