In Dante there is an ongoing symbiosis between poetic practice and meta-literary reflection, manifest in his propensity towards self-commentary (Vita Nuova, Convivio, Epistole III e XIII) and in his tendency to draw up more or less explicit frameworks of the history of literature and actual militant criticism (Chapter XXV of the Vita Nuova, De vulgari eloquentia and Commedia). It is therefore legitimate to describe him as the first critic of the Italian literary tradition, without whom there would be no proper account of Italian lyric poetry of the thirteenth century. While some of his judgements (especially his disparaging comments on Guittone) are tendentious and strategically functional to his own poetics, many of the critical categories he formulated are still valid today: grouping the poets of the so-called Sicilian School on political-cultural grounds rather than by geography; his re-evaluation of Guido delle Colonne of the Sicilian group; seeing Guinizzelli as precursor rather than exponent of the stilnovo; identifying a homogeneous group of illustrious Florentine and Pistoian poets as constituting the historiographic category of dolce stil novo. Beyond the lasting relevance of specific judgements, however, what count most are his methodological innovations in relation to literary historiography, namely, an attention to geography (particularly clear in De vulgari) and the historicization of contemporaneity, and therefore awareness of the changeable nature of literary taste. This is especially evident in the Commedia, where the narrator-protagonist never forgets that he is a poet, meeting or conversing with other poets (besides the ancients, Forese, Bonagiunta, Guinizzelli, Arnaut Daniel) along the way, especially in Purgatorio, and thereby instituting a dimension of literary criticism and self-criticism, in which silences (Cino da Pistoia) and allusions (decisive in the case of Cavalcanti) count just as much as, or perhaps more than, explicit critique.