The greatest poet of the French Renaissance, Pierre de Ronsard wrote poems that were committed to memory by Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots, with whom he maintained a close friendship. He influenced Yeats and other modern poets. This is the first complete translation into English of one of the great sonnet sequences. These poems follow the poet's love of an unattainable beauty, Cassandra, enhanced with explorations of classical myth. Clive Lawrence's translation won the John Dryden Translation Competition at the University of East Anglia.