SOURCE: Goldin, Frederick. “Guido Cavalcanti.” In German and Italian Lyrics of the Middle Ages: An Anthology and a History, edited by Frederick Goldin, pp. 298-311. Garden City: Anchor Books, 1973.

[In the following essay, Goldin explains Cavalcanti's influence on court poetry, particularly regarding changes in thematic and stylistic elements, and outlines his system of spirits, which allowed him to de-secularize his descriptions of inner experience.]

The poet was born in Florence to a rich and distinguished family. In 1300, the Guelphs having split into two factions and causing great civil disorder by their violent antagonism, Cavalcanti was exiled along with other leaders of both sides. (Dante at the time was one of the priors—chief magistrates—who ordered the banishment of the leaders.) Cavalcanti was recalled to Florence soon afterwards, and there he died at the end of August in that same year.

Dante was deeply devoted to Cavalcanti (who was at least six years his senior), calling him “primo amico,” his closest friend, and adopting into his own poetry the most distinctive features of Cavalcanti's style. From the time of their first meeting down to Guido's death, the poet was probably the most important influence on Dante, with respect to lyric poetry. Aside from the frequent citations in DVE [De vulgari eloquentia] and in numerous other places, the depth of Dante's devotion can be gauged from a reading of the Vita Nuova alone, which is dedicated to Guido.

The reasons for Dante's admiration are not hard to find. There had never been a poet like Guido before; and it was he—far more than Guinizelli—who set the future of the courtly tradition in Italy. What Contini puts forward as Dante's view holds good absolutely: “… if the stilnovist experiment must be reduced to a single initiative and a single name, it could not be anyone else's but Cavalcanti's.”

It was he who most resolutely took a stand against what he considered the tortuousness, bombast, and vulgarity of Guittone's style; and it seems that it was from his influence that the attitude of the stilnovisti and of succeeding generations toward Guittone was formed. It is clear that Cavalcanti knew exactly what he wanted in the way of style: his poetry is far simpler in syntax, less periodic, more direct, and—insofar as it is freer of complex rhetorical formulations—more “natural” than Guittone's. On the other hand, while he rejected Guittone's rhetorical complications, he introduced other complications of a sort that Guittone never would have dreamed of: he formed his poetry out of other learned traditions—science and medicine, especially—that had not been considered “poetic” before. The heart, for example, as a poetic image is as old as poetry itself; but rarely, if ever, before Cavalcanti was it depicted so nonfiguratively—so scientifically, as the seat, not merely of the passions, but of specific medical processes.

It was not only out of his reaction to the negative ideal of Guittone that his “new style” was formed. His themes were carefully chosen out of the traditional repertory of the courtly lyric. Salinari has defined what he kept and what he left out:

“His themes and his sentimental situations do not differ from the themes and situations already hallowed by tradition; his theories on love, though they benefit from the logical clarity of a more subtle and original background in philosophy (especially Averroism), do not reveal new aspects of the phenomenon of love … Cavalcanti conceives [of love] as violent and sensual … Thus the possibility of an ideal and edifying love is excluded, and consequently such themes are excluded from Guido's lyric poetry … It cannot escape notice that the principal motifs which are basic to his poetry (love as a battle; tears, terror, sighs, and finally the death of the heart, as effects of love; the joy of love as a fleeting consequence of the illusion that there was pity in the eyes of the lady; the love that reaches through the eyes and penetrates into the heart) correspond exactly to the fundamental aspects of love according to his theory … Nor can one overlook Cavalcanti's rejection of a great part of the themes greatly in vogue in the troubadour tradition … Gone are the slanderers, those who discredit the honor of the beloved and create differences between the lovers; gone are the walks beneath the windows, the jealousy, the conversations with the beloved, the laments for the distance, the memories of meetings and of moments passed together, of endearments and quarrels. Gone above all (except in some imitations in his youth) is every analogy with the world of nature, of science, those analogies that had been so dear to the Provençals, the Sicilians, and Guinizelli. Gone are the roses, the flowers, and the precious gems, all the delicate comparisons with which the courtly poets strove to represent the beauty of the beloved lady; gone are the ‘blond tresses’ and the ‘clear visage’ which, even in their generality, delineated a concrete and material reality. Cavalcantian praise rejects every earthly reference: the lady is beautiful, humble, gentle—so beautiful that she cannot be described … The Cavalcantian lady is deprived of face, of body, of any kind of background. She, like all of Guido's figures, moves in a scene without space and without colors …”

This passage, it should be noted, concerns itself exclusively with Cavalcanti's “tragic style”: everything in the courtly tradition that needs any kind of communal audience—especially a court—to complete its meaning is left out; everything else that does not require a specific setting is retained. The results are disheartening. For this loss of “earthly reference” must mean that love is no longer an ameliorative and integrative force. The old “courtly love” could not have existed without a social setting: it integrated the lover with his class by fixing all his lusts and aspirations on a class ideal. The recognition of his peers was his reward. But once the objective setting—the court—is dissolved, the ethical rewards of courtly love are canceled out, and the only part of it that remains is the deprivation—an unrewardable suffering that has nothing to do with “courtliness” any more. Courtly love without a court is a bad dream, sacrifice without expectations. The lover has no prospect but extinction, and the beloved lady no other rôle to play but that of La Belle Dame sans Merci.

Now there are plenty of Cavalcanti's poems in which love is a pleasant and unworrisome thing, especially when he composes in one of the traditional genres that never had a courtly setting—the pastorela (no. 33) for an obvious example. Cavalcanti composed in many styles, including the old courtly style. But when his songs are “tragic,” that is, when they are concerned exclusively with the inner experience of love, then the love they tell about is irrational, debilitating, sterile—its destructive effect is carefully spelled out in his famous theoretical canzone, Donna me prega.

The lady, too, is denigrated, though in a quite subtle way. She is never denounced, all direct abuse being reserved for Love itself, rather than the lady. But in the absence of a court, once her beauty and virtue are no longer seconded by the belief of an exalted community, all her glory is tentative. She now becomes an absolutely empty screen on which the lover sees whatever Love, firmly seated in his heart, wants him to see. Nothing the lover says about her is reliable: her indescribable beauty; the voice preceding her, foretelling her celestial return; the star arising from her image announcing the lover's salvation—all these are visions arising from the lover's need, for Love uses the lover's native forces to enslave him, even his infinite longing. For the lover's soul, like all human souls, is magnetized by the infinite; but Love knows how to mislead it, through the senses, into thinking that the lady is its goal. And so it comes about that that infinite magnetism follows the track of all the common desires that propel the lover to the lady.

The lyrics that have this lady as their subject are quite different from those that focus on the poet's subjective experience of love, for the simple reason that they have to have some kind of setting. These lyrics that praise her beauty and beneficence accomplish this praise by celebrating her effect, and so there is always some trace of a secular scene in which she appears—a street, a voice, a witnessing citizenry that instantly recognizes her perfection; though these testimonies all are illusions too. But in the lyrics of the tragic style, there is no setting outside the boundaries of the lover's being, there is only an inner space full of violence and tension caused by the unrolling of physical processes.

Just as he reduced the thematic elements of the courtly tradition and thereby achieved a powerful, urgent-sounding message, so he reduced the stylistic elements, with a corresponding effect. Foster and Boyde, as they trace the effects of Cavalcanti's influence on Dante, specify Cavalcanti's chief devices: “… the independent status of the faculties, the consecutive clauses, the use of snatches of direct speech … favourite words as paura, pensoso … the technique whereby the pensieri … spiriti, anima, core, are all personified as independent and autonomous agents, and the lover has no integrated personality … consecutive clauses leading to a passage in direct speech to close the frons …” Opposing this starkness of rhetoric and theme is a dazzling skill in rhyme and versification—a love of technical virtuosity that is inherent, and has remained intact, in the courtly tradition. Thus the tension and multiple conflicts of the inner life are reflected on the verbal surface.

The means by which Cavalcanti represents that inner experience is the most remarkable aspect of the new style. This is the whole complex of the “spirits.” These spirits had been around earlier but had never played such a rôle in anyone's poetry before; so prominent are they in Cavalcanti's, however, that he himself wrote a wonderful parody of the whole works (Per gli occhi fere un spirito sottile). What follows is the briefest sketch of this proliferating system. (There is a good orientation to the subject in Maurice Valency's In Praise of Love.)

These spirits are material substances, produced by the body. Their function is to serve as a medium in various relations: between the senses and their objects; between the organs of the body and the soul. They originate in the digestion of ordinary food and undergo various degrees of refinement through heat, depending upon the nature of their specific tasks.

The spiritus naturalis, the basic substance, is produced in the liver. It is superheated in the heart, the lungs acting as a cooling bellows to prevent scorching, and becomes the spiritus vitalis, which brings warmth and motion to the organs and limbs. It is further refined in the brain and becomes the spiritus animalis. The spirit is an extremely volatile and rarefied substance and, in its highest degree of refinement, as dematerialized as matter can be without ceasing to be matter. It is this hot and airy stuff that forms the nexus between all inner relations, such as that between the senses and the intellect, and outer relations, such as that between the lover and the beloved lady.

Various spirits, formed from the spiritus naturalis, are crucial to all the operations of the senses. For example, visual spirits fly from the eye, strike the object, and return bearing its shape and color. In the same way, there are tactile, olfactory, auditory, gustatory spirits, each capable of returning with a special image. These fragmentary images are integrated by the common sense, the sensus communis, which is still a physical, not a mental, faculty: all these operations so far are common to men and animals.

This integrated image of spirits passes into the heart, where it is superheated and then borne to the first of the three cells of the brain, the imagination, which is the storehouse of such images. Then it passes to the middle cell, the reason (vis aestimativa), where all of its accidents are abstracted—its color, its shape, its peculiar location in time and space, all of the traits of its secular appearance. Washed clean of every local and individualizing mark, it is no longer a visual image: in this abstract state it reveals its essence to the intellect. (On the rôle of the passive and active intellects in this operation, see the notes to Donna mi prega.) The spirit is now borne to the third and hindmost chamber, the memory. Out of this chamber the passage of the spirit continues downward to relay the intellect's judgment and command to the organs and sinews of growth and movement.

Now it can be seen why one of the deadly effects of love is caused by too much sighing, for sighs are exhalations of vital spirits: as they “flee” and “betray” the lover, he must become physically weaker, he may even die. Only a new influx of spirits issuing from the lady—a kindly look (the emission of visual spirits), a gentle smile (the emission of risible spirits)—or the return of his own fled spirits can save him now. Thus, in one sonnet (Veder poteste), Cavalcanti describes the near death of his body: afflicted by the spirit of love, the soul was on the verge of despair and desired to flee:

E po' sostenne, quando vide uscire
degli occhi vostri un lume di merzede,
che porse dentro al cor nova dolcezza.
E quel sottile spirito che vede
soccorse gli altri che volean morire,
gravati d'angosciosa debolezza.
(But then it stopped, for it saw issuing
from your eyes a light of pity,
which rendered an unknown sweetness in my heart.
And this subtle spirit of my sight
rescued every other desiring to die,
borne down by languishing weakness.)

The sighs, as visual and auditory spirits, range widely through barriers and spaces that the body cannot traverse. They bring to the beloved lady an image of the poet's inner state, which she may then come to understand—if she wishes to, that is; and they bring back to him new tidings of the lady, a new influence of her nobility and power. Sometimes these spirits return with no clear image, weak and in great confusion, their very vagueness and disorder a reflection of something ineffable, something miraculous in the lady:

Lagrime ascendon de la mente mia
sì tosto come questa donna sente,
che van facendo per li occhi una via,
per la qual passa spirito dolente;
che entra per li miei sì debilmente
ch'oltra non puote color discovrire
che il maginar vi si possa finire.

(Cavalcanti, I' prego voi)

(Tears from the depths of my soul arise
so quickly when it feels this lady near,
that going forth they make a passage through my eyes,
through which a spirit issues, full of fear.
So feeble is it when it re-enters there,
it can reveal no color, no design,
which this imagination can define.)

(The most beautiful poem ever composed upon this image of the “pilgrim spirit” is the final sonnet of the VN: [Vita Nuova] the sigh issues from the poet's heart, mounts up beyond the outermost heaven, drawn by a new understanding bestowed by Love, and comes to Beatrice in her splendor; once returned to the longing heart that sent it forth, it speaks so subtly that the poet cannot understand it, he knows only that it speaks of Beatrice. The image of her he can see, but the meaning of her glory is as yet beyond him.)

The system upon which this imagery is based is infinitely more complex than this little sketch could possibly suggest—the four humors, the four elements, the influences of the zodiac, and the various complexions of men find their places within it, and it is made to harmonize with Aristotelian and Averroistic epistemology. As a theory of knowledge it was invented in order to preserve the autonomy and supremacy of the intellect; that is, it sought to explain how the intellect could interpret sense stimuli without being subjected to them. For if the mind responded to material objects directly, it would be passive regarding them—they would be the stimuli, its act of understanding the response—and hence inferior to them (by the principles of this theory, the passive is inferior to the active).

In Cavalcanti's hands this system of spirits did great things. It enabled him to go against the current of conventional poetic usage and to find what he could believe in as the source, the spring of poetry, not yet descended through settlements and generations. And the way he found this source is the way of poets in every period, who seek the meaning of experience not so much in experience itself, as in the language that depicts it—just as great aesthetic movements arise when artists see new possibilities, not in the object, but in the resources of their art. Cavalcanti uses this medical theory of the spirits always to one purpose: the literalization of figurative language. This is a method followed by many another poets intent on redeeming the reference of “poetic” words.

It was through this system that Cavalcanti achieved what other late poets aspired to in vain: the complete desecularization of inner experience, and an objective system of describing it. The love relation now has no other setting than the inner life of the lover, and it unfolds according to the processes of that inner life, rather than any ethical or communal ideal. The inner experience of love now is no longer expressed in a pattern of conventional subjective assertions to an audience of assumed lovers who are supposed to recognize their own experience, but in terms of an autonomous process so organic and coherent that it can be “demonstrated.” Nothing is needed but an inceptive stimulus: the lady, or rather the sight of the lady, sets the machinery going, and then it goes on in its own determined course. After that, there is not much else for the lady to do except to stand in as the goal of the searching spirits.

Nothing on earth, as a matter of fact, has much of a rôle to play outside the unrolling of the poet's inner experience. There is a certain subsecular nexus of communication from spirit to spirit, the public reality of both the lover and the lady being dissolved. Aside from that, the only other intimacy possible in this system—friends, enemies, the dearly beloved's residence, all the definitions of a community having vanished—is with the great cosmic process of the heavens, which have a somewhat analogous structure (as the intellect is to the spirits, so is the Creator to the intelligences of heaven) and exert a continual influence. This, too, is spelled out in Donna me prega. Poetic language has changed that larger context which every utterance needs to complete its meaning: its reference extends beyond the human circle to the cosmos.

Thus Cavalcanti was the most successful of all the late poets of the courtly tradition. He did what badly needed doing: he found a way to write effective love poetry without any secular setting. Through the imagery of the spirits, he was able to write of a love relation that needed no geographical, communal, or ethical realm—no messengers, no customs, no code. The inner life, the individuality, of the lover becomes the terrain of a condition. His spirits and faculties populate this condition. But what makes this innovation great—what makes all great innovations great—is that it gives to the tradition it acts upon a way to live on. It preserved as much of the courtly love tradition as could be, when there were no more courts.

The love relation in his poetry, for example, is still a relation between the lover and the image of a beautiful lady; but in the absence of an exclusive, self-defining audience, the image can no longer be ideal, tutelary, emblematic, “Lady Courtliness.” The image is now materialized, consisting in part of spirits issuing from the lady, but mostly of the lover's own projected spirits returning to him in her likeness. This image does not vaguely “come to mind” now, but invades the lover's internal system through the organs of sense and eventually dominates it all the way to the intellect.

It is no longer possible for the poet to impersonate a lover and to cast the audience into various rôles—the friends and enemies are gone. But if impersonation now is obsolete, there is another, more fitting technique that Cavalcanti uses with great brilliance: he personifies the elements of a condition—the condition of love. He gives an urgent personality to the spirits and faculties in their inner scene—the spirits are afraid and run away, the soul grieves and longs to depart, the heart beholds a redeeming spirit approaching, the sighs go searching for help. In this way he dramatizes inner experience to the same extent as the earlier poets dramatized courtly experience. (This is just what other late poets—for example, Ulrich and Burkart—tried to do, with ludicrous effect.)

In the old courtly lyric, the singer would scan the various perspectives of the audience and depict his love from each point of view: in this way he revealed the ideal character of his love and proved the superiority of his noble conception to all those who mocked it. Now Cavalcanti, of course, could not do this, and he had to find another way, because some pattern of perspectives is essential to poetic language. As he changed the scene of poetry from the court to the inner world, he found a way, precisely suitable to this new scene, of making the reader's mind shift continually from one perspective to another.

His system of spirits, as we have noted, had the effect of materializing figurative language—images in the mind now are particles passing from chamber to chamber. At the same time, the conventional, figurative sense persists, for he was writing in the courtly tradition, where that language evolved. Thus, when the spirits fly in terror to the lady and render before her the figure of the poet sighing his life away, this is a way of expressing, in the language of medicine and physiology, the same thing contained in the old envoi, where the poet declared that his thoughts, or his heart, always wandered in search of the lady and dwelt with her—here, where he is, the world sees nothing but the shell of a man. The message, as such, is the same in both cases. What is different is that Cavalcanti has found a way of expressing this convention so that it comes forth as literally, unfiguratively, materially true—the doctrine of the spirits, after all, is not some sentimental effusion, it comes from Galen, and really sick people were treated in accordance with it. Sometimes they even recovered.

Cavalcanti's lines, therefore, are figurative statements denoting a real material process in the air; or purely denotative statements literalizing a figure of speech. The constant shifting of the reader's perspective between the scientific literalness and traditional figurativeness of Cavalcanti's language is the defining experience of his poetry. This is how he makes every line resound with perspective. Every time the reader is entranced by the movement of those tiny particles, he is snatched up by the recognition of the emotions they materialize; every time he reads these lines as standard effusions, he is wrenched back to see them in their guise as literal statements.

This experience of the literalness of figurative language does not occur in the courtly tradition before Cavalcanti; and out of this resolution of opposites a meaning is engendered that is new in the secular lyric genre: the theme of the astonishing relation between the soul's longings and the necessary processes of the material world. Neither realm abolishes the other, quite the contrary: the literalness of this spirituality corroborates it, proves that it is real and that it redeems reality. Above all, it confirms the sacred doctrine that the world was created for man—man comes forth as the glory of the world, for the world needs man, it is not sufficient unto itself in the blind processes that man's perception alone defines and signifies. Cavalcanti's imagery is altogether different from that of the traditional Natureingang, where the common ploy was to depict nature as reflecting or opposing the lover's emotional state. The relation in Cavalcanti's poems between the sentient lover and the atoms of his feelings is not one of reflection or opposition. Something quite different is conveyed: the sense of human intelligence transcending all these processes.

There is always the danger—and Cavalcanti never forgets it—that that intelligence can be engulfed by what it ought to transcend: in the “tragic” poems, love leads to ruination. But for all these dark shadows, Cavalcanti's poetry is incredibly optimistic and full of self-congratulation, quite in the vein of courtly song: in the earlier lyric, a representative of the courtly class sang about how good it felt to be on top of the pile; Cavalcanti celebrates the privileges of man—or rather of a very few gifted men, a small circle of poets—exalted above all things in the ordinary world. The tremendous, dwarfing presence of the Creator—the One who devised the world for man's pre-eminence—is pretty much excluded in this poetry: Cavalcanti's interest does not reach many orbits above the earth. His theme is the relation between the necessitarian sublunary world and man's redeeming presence in it, a relation already implied in the contrasting meanings of spirit: on the one hand, vision and understanding and a kinship with the eternal; on the other hand, the stuff concocted in the liver.

As we shift continually from one perspective to another, we become aware that this constant shifting is itself the final meaning of the poem, the experience it meant us to have: for that movement in our mind is a re-enactment of our duality; and it is already the fulfillment of our supreme purpose on earth: to see the world exactly and to spiritualize it—as when we are aware that the beauty of a beautiful sunset is caused by dust.

Cavalcanti's great service to the courtly lyric tradition was to save it through this literalization—to ground it in the rules of flux and thus to accredit its spirituality, when it was in danger of not being able to find a location in any sphere of life. His poetry is best understood in terms of this tradition. It is true that he often denounces love, but such denunciations are squarely in the tradition—how many poets before him sang that they were sighing their lives away and forsaking the highest things! Cavalcanti stresses this destructive aspect of love, its former ameliorative power having disappeared with the dissappearance of the courts, but not exclusively. The effect of the beloved lady sometimes leads the lover to look beyond the processes of love: “If you gaze upon this one, you will see her virtue ascended into heaven.”

It is at this point, however, that Cavalcanti's vision fades; and yet, even in the terms of the theories he adopted, love had a redemptive power, which needed to be specified as precisely as its physical processes. For the beautiful image, once purified by abstraction, could lead the intellect to a vision of Beauty. But such a thought is hard to find in Cavalcanti, except as an unexamined corollary: he had no wish to follow this track, wherever it led. The only poet who did was the one who hailed him as the dearest friend.

Cavalcanti's vision, then, was pretty much confined to the sublunary world, the heavens being mostly a vast analogy to the inner life. But the temptation to read back from Dante is very great, especially in some passages. For example, Cavalcanti calls the lady donna angelicata in one lyric; in another, the thrice abstracted essence of the beloved announces his salvation. But however often passages like this can be adduced, Cavalcanti was not on the road that Dante followed. The phrase donna angelicata in its context simply means “angelic lady” and so it takes its place in the register of compliments at the disposal of courtly love poets since the beginning.

But it is tempting to stress the participial form and to see in the beloved what would amount to an angelicized lady, a forebear of Beatrice—though such an idea does not fit the context. Dante himself, in a famous passage in the VN (xxiv), took her name, Giovanna, and the season she was compared to (Spring, Primavera) and depicted an overwhelming concept: in the unrolling of his life, there was an analogous re-creation of the great order of salvation, for as Beatrice is his savior, so Giovanna recreates Saint John, announcing her (prima verrà, “she will come first”).

But, of course, this is all Dante's idea, it is none of Cavalcanti's, and to look for it in Cavalcanti is to misread and misprize him. He had nothing like this in mind. What he wanted to do, and what he did so wonderfully, was to revivify traditional courtly poetry, to make it fit the circumstances of belief in his generation. As such it was no different from the ambition of Guinizelli and of the Sicilians before him—and of many fine poets ever since the first “new generation.” The special problem of these late poets, as we have observed, was that they were continuing a theme created for a scene that was gone, and they had only the inner life and the vast air as possibilities for a setting. What Dante did has nothing to do with them, nor were they concerned with what concerned him.

The best way to read a poem like Fresca rosa novella, for example, is to forget about Dante first of all, and to stay within the confines that the poet has marked out: the poem, the inner life, the universal analogy. Then there arises from the text itself—from the images and the verbal forms—a certain pattern, a continuous alternation between activity and passivity, between the emission and reception of transforming energy. It is this pattern that determines the passive form angelicata. It is this pattern, also, that gives the ending, with its reiterated forza, a dramatic and triumphant effect; and a retroactive resonance to the beginning. Fresca rosa novella comes to denote one elemental integrity—the repetition of the -a ending, apart from its grammatical necessity, has the effect of a ligature. These words now signify, not a thing with two attributes, but the integrity of a creature whose youth and miraculousness are of its essence—a new reality at the beginning and at the end of the worldwide process of spring.

In this personification and dramatic play of forces lies Cavalcanti's special gift. And it is instructive to see this in a poem like Fresca rosa novella, for that is one of his most joyous and least doctrinaire lyrics, not at all in the “tragic style,” which is usually regarded as most characteristic, and to which most of this introduction has been devoted.

Text: Guido Favati, ed. Guido Cavalcanti, le Rime. Documenti di Filologia, 1. Milan and Naples: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1957; with some changes in punctuation.