The Dolce stil novo Poets

This essay was originally published on Pol Culture.

The last and the greatest of the Dolce stil novo poets is Dante. It seems only fitting that he defined the school and provided its name. In Song XXIV of the Purgatorio, the Dante figure encounters the spirit of Bonagiunta da Lucca (c.1220-1290), a Tuscan poet who worked in the traditions of the Sicilian School. Through him, Dante defines his own work as a break and an advance on the work of Bonagiunta, Guittone d'Arezzo (a contemporary of Bonagiunta's), and the earlier Sicilian School poet Giacomo da Lentini. The Bonagiunta character describes Dante's work as "dal dolce stil novo ch'i'odo / that sweet new style that I hear" (Purg. 24.57). In Song XXVI, the spirit of poet Guido Guinizelli (c.1230-1276) is encountered. Dante describes Guinizelli as the father of him and those poets between them who wrote the "rime d'amore usar dolci e leggiadre / rhymes of love using sweetness and grace" (Purg. 26.99). He thus identifies Guinizelli and himself as the beginning and ending (although culmination is probably the more appropriate word) of the school. In his language treatise De vulgari eloquentia / On the Eloquence of the Common Language, Dante explicitly identifies Guido Cavalcanti (c.1255-1300), Lapo Gianni (c.1250-1328), and Cino da Pistoia (c.1270-1337) as his poetic peers (1.13.4). The Dolce stil novo poets wrote in the Tuscan vernacular, and their work (especially Dante's) so popularized that dialect that it is credited with making Tuscan the national language of Italy. In other words, Dante and the others gave us the Italian language as we know it today. They are inarguably the first school of European poetry to be of more than historical interest since the height of the Roman Empire.

After Dante, the two most famous Dolce stil novo poets are Guido Guinizelli and Guido Cavalcanti. Guinizelli's most famous work, the canzone "Within the gentle heart Love shelters him," is probably best known to English readers from the first four lines (translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti) that George Eliot used as the epigraph for chapter 61 of Daniel Deronda:

Within the gentle heart love shelters him,
As birds within the green shade of the grove.
Before the gentle heart, in Nature's scheme,
Love was not, nor the gentle heart ere Love.

These lines are remarkable; one can hear them echoing through the most famous passages in Dante, specifically in Francesca da Rimini's lament in Inferno, Song V ("Love, which the gentle heart quickly finds within" [Inf. 5.100]).

Those interested in Rossetti's complete translation of the poem can find it here; it's the second poem down. One sees all the key features of Dolce stil novo poetry. Dante may have used some of them for tragic effect in the Inferno, but he and the others used the language and thinking in this poem as conventions in their lyric work. Among those conventions are the trope of the "gentle heart." There is also the personification of Love and the resultant emphasis on allegory. Additionally, one has the portrayal of the woman who is the object of the poet's longing as an angelic or divine figure. Guinizelli even recognizes the potential blasphemy of viewing a woman in this manner, a problem that became perhaps the defining aspect of Dante's greatest works.

"Within the gentle heart" also sets the stage for the richer use of figurative language among Guinizelli's followers. The poem is especially rich in simile. The temporal analogy between Love and the gentle heart is expanded upon in a second simile that compares their simultaneity with that of light and the sun. In the second stanza, Love's passion in the gentle heart is likened to the virtues of a precious stone. These are further likened to the woman whom the heart falls in love with. The woman is also identified with a star, with the sun overtly used as a trope for God. Guinizelli, as can be seen here, is not content to leave a figuration alone after introducing it. He works it through several stages of conversion. In the third stanza, he compares Love to a lamp's flame, and branches out to an ironic analogy of fire and water to discuss the effect on Love from evil. From there he shifts to a comparison of Love to diamond veins in iron ore. It's a remarkably complex poem, and of much greater sophistication than anything seen from the troubadours or the Sicilians.

Guinizelli may have been Dante's poetic father, but Guido Cavalcanti (at right) was most definitely his mentor. In chapter III of La vita nuova, Dante calls Cavalcanti his best friend. He relates that Cavalcanti saw the promise in his earliest poems and provided the guidance that set him on the poetic road he travelled. Cavalcanti's own poetry established him as the greatest of Dante's predecessors. He apparently saw himself in opposition to Guinizelli, as his pieces interrogate--often pessimistically--the ideas present in Guinizelli's work. On a technical level, he avoids the trippy twists and turns of perpetual simile conversion one finds in Guinizelli. Poetically, Cavalcanti keeps his feet on the ground: he begins with a single controlling concept, and everything that follows refers back to it.

Cavalcanti's predilection for a strong conceptual foundation can be most easily seen in the sonnet "A woman's charms, her perceptive heart." (Click here for a translation.) The central idea of a woman's charms and heart is present from the first line. The remainder of the sonnet's octet takes this idea and creates one simile after another, with vehicles as disparate as "Men-at-arms filled with courtesy" to "A flowing river, meadows all of flowers." In the sestet, he presents a superb rhetorical reversal: as wonderful as a woman's charms are in general, they pale before those of the writer's lady, who compares to them as the heavens compare to the earth. Cavalcanti presents one vividly realized idea, and then uses it to develop a second, opposed idea. Elegantly hyperbolic and ironic, it's and extraordinarily concise piece of work, with an exceptional sense of how to engineer effects.

Cavalcanti's skill is also on fine display in the dark, pessimistic "You who reach my heart through the eyes." (Click here.) He begins with the title line, and every subsequent line in the octet refers back to it, shading it with sadness. Cavalcanti has a strong sense of drama. In the octet, he establishes a premise and a developing conflict: the woman's gaze is presented as the catalyst for the injury Love inflicts on the writer's morale. In the sestet, he gives the reader crisis: the woman is no longer seen as the catalyst; she is Love's accomplice in this assault. The resolution comes with the soul's realization that the heart is dead, and the terror that it is next. This critique of the notion of the edifying nature of Love could not be more effectively presented.

His most famous work is probably "Donna me prega / A lady asks me" (click here), which combines the dark, pessimistic view of Love found in "You who reach my heart through the eyes" with, to a certain extent, the rhetorical--rather than dramatic--exploration of subject matter found in "A woman's charms, her perceptive heart." Love is treated as dark and elusive figure, though ultimately a contradictory one. Cavalcanti sees Love as a destructive force ("Poor in discernment--so vice is his friend. / Oft from his power then death will follow," [34-35]), but he also recognizes Love's virtues ("Yet far from all deceit--I say, worthy of trust, / So that compassion is born from him alone." [69-70]). The style doesn't quite match that of "A woman's charms"--Cavalcanti catalogues contrasting ideas rather than structuring reversals between them--but his juxtapositional approach here creates its own sort of dialogue. The style anticipates modernist techniques, and it's not hard to see the appeal the poem had for Ezra Pound. He reworked and expanded a translation of it into Canto XXXVI of The Cantos.

But in spite of the accomplishments of "Donna me prega," Cavalcanti's rigorously logical style of poetry failed him completely in his treatment of Love's nature. It was perhaps so reductive that he felt compelled to abandon it altogether. The task fell to Dante to meet the challenge of developing a coherent, rigorous theory of Love through poetry, and his La vita nuova was both the result and culmination of the Dolce stil novo's concerns.

The Sicilian School

This essay originally appeared on Pol Culture.

Historically, the Sicilian School was the most significant of the early successors to the troubadour movement. It was a group of poets based in the court of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, and after his death, his illegitimate son and successor Manfred. It was at its peak between 1230 and 1266.

The Sicilians differed from the troubadours in a number of respects. They could not play music, so a greater emphasis was put on the sound of the poetry when read. The women in the poetry tend to be far more idealized, and due to the poets being notaries and other officials, the poems tend to be structured like arguments. Arbitrary structural forms, such as sestina, were done away with.

The most famous of the Sicilian poets is probably Pier delle Vigne (c.1190-1249) (at left), although his fame is not primarily because of his work. Most know him from Dante's portrayal of him in Song XII of the Inferno. He is the affectatious, self-pitying courtier condemned to the wood of suicides. His work, however, is different from what one would expect. Most commentaries on the Divine Comedy identify Pier's pretentious manner of speaking--he often sounds like Polonius in Shakespeare's Hamlet--as typical of the manner of Sicilian School poetry. However, the belabored wordplay Dante depicts doesn't seem to be a conspicuous feature of Pier's poetry. Consider "Love in whom I hope and desire." (Click here.) The only place where the constant word repetitions Dante mocked appear is in the first stanza, and the use of "hope" is hardly as stilted as Dante would seem to have it.

A striking aspect of the poem relative to the troubadour pieces is the reduced emphasis on hyperbole. Arnaut Daniel's use of the sestina seemed to have led the way the use of tropes, particularly similes, and Pier relies on them for the poem's key expressive moments. His likening his preferred manner of coming to his lady to that of "a secret thief" (9-10) is a throwaway, but the imagery of the sailor and the ship at sea is more developed. In the first stanza, Pier analogizes his hope to win his lady's love to a man at sea endeavoring to return home (4-8). In the fourth, he creates a metaphor from that simile, implicitly likening a harbor to the comfort of his lady's love (29-32). It may seem quite a modest poetic achievement, but this harkening back to Odysseus's quest to return to Penelope in the Odyssey is a key moment in the development of Western poetry. Pier's imagery finds its own echoes in some of the best and most influential work of Petrarch. Figures such as Thomas Wyatt were entranced with Petrarch's handling of these and similar tropes, and brought his work to England, thus setting the stage for the likes of Shakespeare, Donne, and almost everyone else who followed.

The other major figure of the Sicilian School is Giacomo da Lentini (c.1200-1250). His main contribution to the development of poetry is formal; his imagery is nothing particularly significant. His most famous work is "I have placed my heart in God's service." (Click here to read.) In terms of expressive language, there's not much beyond the implicit hyperbole of the poem's view that true salvation comes from finding one's lady love in Heaven. There are no tropes in the poem. But one can see the argumentative structure identified with the Sicilians. The first eight lines state the poet's proposition of wishing to be with his lady in Heaven, and the final six implicitly answer a criticism of that proposition, namely that in Heaven, earthly desires have no place.

Giacomo's achievement in "I have placed my heart in God's service" was to create the first sonnet, a poetic form employed by such later poets as Guido Cavalcanti and Dante, perfected by Petrarch, and epitomized by the lyric poetry of William Shakespeare. It is a fourteen-line poem, and the traditional Italian structure follows Giacomo's example. The first eight lines, called an octave, either present a narrative, state a proposition, or raise a question. The final six lines, referred to as the sestet, enhances the content of the octave by providing commentary on the narrative, applying the proposition, or answering the question.

Pier delle Vigne and Giacomo da Lentini's achievements were aesthetically modest but historically momentous. Building on the foundation provided by the troubadours, they set the stage further for Western poetry. One thing that is important to remember about them and the other Sicilians is that poetry was a secondary concern to them, a form of recreation. Like the troubadours, they were primarily entertainers. But entertainers who practice an art almost inevitably give way to the self-conscious aesthetes, and the first group of those, known as the Dolce stil novo school, were the next major step in Western poetry's development.