Guido Cavalcanti

Chapter 3 introduces Guido Cavalcanti’s radically internalized model of poetic subjectivity as a point of contrast with the other poets in this study. The chapter demonstrates Cavalcanti’s resistance towards any sort of unitary poetics or accounts of self and his ambivalence towards religious authority as a source of literary validation. Cavalcanti’s divergence from his predecessors is demonstrated through analysis of his own poetry in dialogue with the works of Guittone, Guinizzelli, and Dante. The chapter explores Cavalcanti’s alternative model of subjectivity and love poetry, in which his texts perform an irreducibly polyphonic subjectivity through multiple personifications, justified by natural philosophy. This analysis foregrounds the importance of an intra-discursive dialogism, in which poetry and subjectivity are generated through tensions and internalized dialogues.