The dolce stil novo

Following a long-standing (but over-simplifying) practice, the expression dolce stil novo, coined by Dante in Purg., XXIV 57 to identify his own early poetry and perhaps that of a number of his friends, refers to the literary experience of a group of poets from Florence and Pistoia, whose precursor is acknowledged to be Guinizzelli, who was from Bologna. In addition to Dante are Cavalcanti and Cino, and the minor poets Lapo Gianni, Gianni Alfani and Dino Frescobaldi. Although recent investigations do not see the group as a school confined by rigid rules, but place more emphasis on the dialectic among them, the young poets undeniably share a polemical tension that likens them to a literary avant-garde in their attitude towards the tradition of lyric poetry tradition, in particular Guittoni’s poetry, which they criticize as linguistically “municipal”, obscure and convoluted as well as weak in its theoretical underpinnings. There are also positive conceptual and expressive links among stilnovisti which can be summed up as their “subtlety”. This refers to the intellectualistic and philosophical character of their poetry, which implies a significant internalization of the experience of love, and the correlative formal dulcedo, namely the selectio verborum, a rigorous but clear syntactic organization, with a preference for a paradigmatic rather than syntagmatic rhetoric, and a normalization and selection of metrical structures. Only a brutal, albeit convenient, scholastic simplification can silence the potent ideological divergences between Dante and Cavalcanti, or the substantial shift in perspective on the woman-angel relationship, which was merely analogical in Guinizzelli, but in Dante entails an ontological identification. Already in the Vita Nuova, and later in the abovementioned passage in Purgatorio, Dante considers his canzone, Donne ch’avete as a “beginning”, suggesting that the real renewal and disentanglement from the past relates above all to his own poetic experience.