(fl. 1180-1200) poet, troubadour
Arnaut Daniel was born into a noble family at the castle of Riberac in Perigord, France. He was a member of the court of Richard Coeur de Lion and was highly regarded as a Provencal poet and troubadour. Troubadours flourished from the late-11th to the late-13th century in southern France and in northern Spain and Italy, and they acquired a social influence unprecedented in the history of medieval poetry. They generally employed complex poetic structures to explore the theme of love, as Arnaut does in his poem “Anc ieu non l’aic, mas elha m’a” (“I don’t hold it, but it holds me”):
… I tell a little of what’s in my heart: fear makes me silent and scared; tongue hides but heart wants what on which, in pain, so broods I languish, but I do not complain because so far as the sea embraces the earth there’s none so kind, actually as the chosen one for whom I long….
This, like many troubadour songs, would have been set to music and performed in noble dining halls.
The poetic style of Arnaut’s poems is called the trobar clus, which used intricate rhymes and complex metrics. Words of the trobar clus were chosen more for their rhythmic and rhyming functions than for their meaning. In terms of form, Arnaut wrote most of his poems in sestinas, six unrhymed stanzas of six lines each that involved elaborate word repetition. He was, in fact, credited with inventing the sestina.
Arnaut was admired by Petrarch and greatly influenced dante, who imitated his sestina form, dubbed him the “best crafter of the mother tongue,” and gave him a prominent place in the Divine Comedy. In the 20th century, interest in his work was revived by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, who translated several of his sestinas.
Only about 18 of Arnaut’s poems survive, and they are among the best examples of troubadour poetry. Arnaut is remembered for his ability to write of love in language that was also flavored by religion, eroticism, and humor, and to set all of his words to music that gave his songs complex metrical schemes.
An English Version of Works by Arnaut Daniel
The Poetry of Arnaut Daniel. Translated by James J. Wilhelm. London: Taylor & Francis, 1983.
A Work about Arnaut Daniel
Wilhelm, James J. Miglior Fabbro: The Cult of the Difficult in Daniel, Dante, and Pound. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1982.
