The 16^th c. Flemish poet Jan van der Noot is predominantly, and rightly, associated with imitating foreign models, and especially French ones, in his verse – a procedure that helped him to incorporate some of the themes and metrical patterns of La Pleiade into the poetry of the Southern Netherlands. An example of his prowess in this regard is the sonnet Tot sijn muse, in which he reshapes the poetic material of a French imitation of Horace’s Ode III 30 (Exegi monumentum…), Ronsard’s XVIIth Ode A sa muse. In order to give a detailed account of Van der Noot’s transformation of this poem, however, one must examine the ways in which the Flemish poet departs from it, forming what is in effect a different, though thematically related text. Performing such an analysis, one has to venture beyond the tacit assumption of much earlier criticism, namely that Van der Noot’s Dutch poems are nothing more than a consistent and straightforward paraphrase of their French models.

The close comparison of the two works reveals that the Dutch poem frequently diverges from Ronsard’s Ode, as Van der Noot reworks, at one point, a metaphor which can be traced to a sonnet by Joachim Du Bellay, and, in another instance, the motif of thankfulness to the muses. The latter, in fact, Van der Noot appears to have retrieved from Horace’s original, with Ode III 30 and Ode IV 3 being the likely suspects, thus effectively bypassing the French intermediary.

This short parallel presentation of the texts of A sa muse and Tot sijn muse, along with a discussion of some of the critical problems posed by Van der Noot’s manner of poetic composition with its frequent reliance on translation, imitation and paraphrase, is accompanied by a brief biographical note on Van der Noot himself. A literary-historical context is provided with a compact analysis of the reception of Van der Noot’s poetry, starting with the bias against imitation shared by the first, post-romantic critics, and concluding with modern-day scholars such as W. Waterschoot, who give a full and impartial account of the poetic procedures employed by the Flemish sonneteer.