The Amours of 1552 With Amours de Cassandre (1552), Ronsard attempted to prove his ability to rival another great Italian poet, Petrarch. Indeed, the Amours, addressed to Cassandra (identified as a Cassandra Salviati), so seek to capture the traits of the Italian's famous love poems to Laura that the existence of a woman named Cassandra at that time must be considered as incidental. Poetry in the sixteenth century was an affair of imitation and skill but rarely biography. The sonnets, in decasyllabic verse, are highly conventional, and although some critics find an appealing baroque quality in certain of them, many poems are so obscure, poorly constructed, and basely derivative that even Ronsard's contemporaries found fault with them. Other, modern critics have been kinder; J. Middleton Murray, writing in 1919, asserted, “It would be hard to find in the whole of … Les Amours a single piece which has not its sufficient charge of gusto.” Scholar I. D. McFarlane, writing in 1974, notes that in the Amours “some of Ronsard's major qualities are already present: a fine gift of organising imagery, a mastery of rhythms, with timely enjambements and an acute sense of the links between metrical and sentence structure, an ability to communicate a feeling of vital force.”