[In the following excerpt, Wilkins provides a brief description of Cavalcanti's life and major poetic interests.]

As Dante called Guinizelli il padre mio, so he called Guido Cavalcanti his “first friend”—though Guido, born probably between 1250 and 1255, was considerably the older of the two. The Cavalcanti were one of the great Guelf families of Florence. Guido, a man of lofty intellect and strong emotions, exceedingly proud and scornful, was deeply versed in philosophy, yet ready to take his violent share in personal or factional feuds. He came nearest, probably, to peace of mind in his hours of philosophic study, from which he gained mastery of the difficult and elaborate psychological theories of the time. He had the reputation of being an unbeliever. In 1292, whatever his motives, he started on what was ostensibly a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, but he did not go beyond Toulouse. Toward the end of the century he became active as a leader of the Whites; and in June 1300, he was among the factional leaders who were banished. He became ill in exile, and was presently allowed to return to Florence, where he died in August.

Cavalcanti's poems—sonnets, several ballate, and two canzoni—are about fifty in number. The most immediately delightful of them all are three sonnets and three ballate which are poems of glowing praise, reminiscent of the similar poems of Guinizelli. But the religious quality of Guinizelli's love is not present here, and the idea of the interdependence of love and inherent nobility is not stressed. Yet these poems, in their greater human simplicity, are as vibrant and as beautiful as the sonnets of Guinizelli. One of them begins:

Who is she coming, whom all gaze upon,
Who makes the air all tremulous with light?

But these joyous poems are by no means characteristic of Cavalcanti.

The most elaborate of his poems is an exceedingly difficult canzone on the nature of love, beginning

Donna me prega, per ch' io voglio dire—
A lady entreats me, wherefore I am ready to speak—

a canzone famous for centuries, and the object of several commentaries. In Cavalcanti's thought, love is a human psychological phenomenon, amenable to scientific analysis and exposition. Such exposition he undertakes in this canzone; and, in spite of the intricate character of his doctrine, he succeeds in setting it forth, highly condensed, in a poem which is at the same time a metrical tour de force, and not untouched with beauty. The love with which he is concerned is of course “fine” love. He maintains that love may exist continuously in the mind as the cherishing of an ideal image of feminine beauty; that it becomes intensely active emotionally when a man cherishing such an image beholds, and is beheld by, a woman who seems to him to be the counterpart of the ideal image in his mind; that he then seeks responsiveness, being in a deathlike distress until it is attained, or if it is withdrawn; and that the active phase of love ends whenever—typically as a result of tensions inherent in the experience itself—the ideal and the real images cease to coincide in the lover's mind.

This concept of love pervades most of Cavalcanti's other lyrics, giving to many of them a somber, even a tragic quality: the words morte and morire—indicating not physical death but the quenching of vitality in the distress of love—recur constantly. Yet the sadness is compatible with great beauty.

Many of his poems are given a dramatic character by the introduction of sentences supposed to be uttered in direct discourse by various persons, real or imaginary: his lady, other ladies, friends, onlookers, love, his heart, his mind, thoughts, sighs, voices, images, the poem itself. And a great many of his poems are peopled with spiriti—fanciful personifications of psychological faculties or of special psychological phenomena. It was presumably in his philosophical studies that he first found such spiriti, and the idea appealed to him so much that he gave it his own extensive personal developments, sometimes subtle, sometimes whimsical. He could even find amusement in his own use of the idea: one of his sonnets has at least one spirito in every line.

Most of Cavalcanti's poems were written for a lady named Giovanna, to whom he gave, in poetry, the name of Primavera, “Springtime.” A few of his later poems were written for a certain Mandetta of Toulouse, who had reminded him of his own lady: these too are deeply felt, and in essence sad, but they are of a gentler and calmer sadness. Several of his sonnets were written in correspondence: they vary from one addressed to Dante in friendly anxiety to others that are in some sense humorous. One of his most beautiful ballate is modeled very skillfully upon the French pastourelle. The last of all his poems, and the most moving, is a ballata written in exile, as he felt the shadow of death closing upon him. After his death his ballata, his soul, and his voice are to go, together, to his lady:

Because I think not ever to return,
                    Ballad, to Tuscany,—
                    Go therefore thou for me
                              Straight to my lady's face,
                              Who, of her noble grace,
                    Shall show thee courtesy …
Ah! ballad, unto thy dear offices
          I do commend my soul, thus trembling;
That thou may'st lead it, for pure piteousness,
          Even to that lady's presence whom I sing.
          Ah! ballad, say thou to her, sorrowing,
                              Whereso thou meet her then:—
                              “This thy poor handmaiden
                              Is come, nor will be gone,
                              Being parted now from one
                              Who served Love painfully.”
Thou also, thou bewilder'd voice and weak,
          That goest forth in tears from my grieved heart,
Shalt, with my soul and with this ballad, speak
                    Of my dead mind, when thou dost hence depart,
                    Unto that lady (piteous as thou art!)
                                        Who is so calm and bright,
                                        It shall be deep delight
                                        To feel her presence there.
                                        And thou, Soul, worship her
                                        Still in her purity.

Cavalcanti was influential, as older companion and as exemplar, upon several younger Florentine poets; but he did not pass on to any one of them his own peculiar darkling torch.