| Gaia: | Le Printemps deserves to feature in comparative literature courses on love poetry. To encourage my colleagues to take up this challenge, I provide an annotated English translation, for
university students, of four poems from the collection. The two shorter and two longer poems
all share a focus either on the female voice, or on a female body without a voice. I ask whether,
when d’Aubigné lends his voice to a female character – whether his wife or an Ovidian heroine –, he is really giving them agency, or rather strengthening his own control through their
voices. In addition, these poems showcase the wide range of styles with which d’Aubigné experiments in Le Printemps, and I argue that to appreciate them it is also crucial to recognise the
intertextual dialogues he sets up with classical and contemporary poets.
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