Guido Cavalcanti

Cavalcanti's work is interpreted by reconstructing the debate of ideas in which it participates, and the new model of poetry devised by Cavalcanti is one of the subjects of this book."--BOOK JACKET.

Cavalcanti is a key figure in the development of Italian poetry, and a fascinating character in the shadow of his contemporary and friend Dante Alighieri. Cavalcanti also has an interesting place in the cannon of English poetry, where he was an important influence on two of his famous translators Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Ezra Pound.

Guido Cavalcanti, Dante’s intellectual mentor, is widely considered among the greatest Italian lyric poets; his famous and notoriously difficult philosophical canzone Donna me prega is often characterized as the most studied lyric poem in Italian literature. This book situates Cavalcanti’s poetry in the context of the Arabic Aristotelian rationalism that entered the Latin West in the 12th century—a tradition marked by questions concerning whether humans can ever transcend their animality. Cavalcanti’s poetry is a focal point where one can view, circa 1300 AD, Arabo-Islamic philosophy in the process of being assimilated and naturalized in Western Europe, eventually leading to values (associated with the Renaissance and the Enlightenment) that we now call modern and secular—in particular, to a notion of human reason as bound up with imagination and with ethical praxis rather than as a means for the attainment of knowledge concerning God and the cosmos. The book features a radically unprecedented interpretation of Donna me prega, starkly opposed to all previous accounts: far from treating love as a threat to reason that would best be eliminated, the canzone praises loving as the essential operation of rational human flourishing. This study of Cavalcanti serves as a prelude to the formulation of a new paradigm for understanding Dante’s Comedy.

Ezra Pound revised the contents for this edition, including the translations and the introduction. In this book, Ezra Pound tried to bring over the qualities of Guido's rhythm, not a line for line, but to embody in English some trace of that power which implies the man. The science of the music of words and the knowledge of their ​magical powers has fallen away since men invoked Mithra by a sequence of pure vowel sounds.

Text in Italian with English translation on opposite pages.

"For all that has been written about the author of the Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) remains the best guide to his own life and work. Dante's writings are therefore never far away in this authoritative and comprehensive intellectual biography, which offers a fresh account of the medieval Florentine poet's life and thought before and after his exile in 1302. Beginning with the often violent circumstances of Dante's life, the book examines his successive works as testimony to the course of his passionate humanity: his lyric poetry through to the Vita nova as the great work of his first period; the Convivio, De vulgari eloquentia and the poems of his early years in exile; and the Monarchia and the Commedia as the product of his maturity. Describing as it does a journey of the mind, the book confirms the nature of Dante's undertaking as an exploration of what he himself speaks of as "maturity in the flame of love." The result is an original synthesis of Dante's life and work." --Amazon.com.