Arnaut Daniel

Who was Arnaut Daniel?

Arnaut Daniel, was an Occitan troubadour of the 12th century, praised by Dante as a "the best smith" and called a "grand master of love" by Petrarch. In the 20th century he was lauded as the greatest poet to have ever lived by Ezra Pound in the The Spirit of Romance.

According to one vida, Daniel was born of a noble family at the castle of Ribérac in Périgord; however, the scant contemporary sources point to him being a jester with pernicious economic troubles. Raimon de Durfort calls him "a student, ruined by dice and shut-the-box". He was the inventor of the sestina, a song of six stanzas of six lines each, with the same end words repeated in every stanza, though arranged in a different and intricate order. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow claims he was also the author of the metrical romance of Lancillotto, or Launcelot of the Lake, but this claim is completely unsubstantiated; Dante's reference to Daniel as the author of prose di romanzi remains, therefore, a mystery.

In Dante's The Divine Comedy, Arnaut Daniel appears as a character doing penance in Purgatory for lust. He responds in Old Occitan to the narrator's question about who he is: