Guido Guinicelli, who died in 1276, when Dante
was eleven years old, and, a little later, Guido Cavalcanti, and some
few others, trusting more than had been done before to their own
inspiration, show themselves as the forerunners of a better day.[8] But
as, in painting, Margheritone and Cimabue, standing between the old and
the new styles, exhibit rather a vague striving than a fulfilled
attainment, so is it with these poets. There is little that is
distinguishingly individual in them. Love is still treated mostly as an
abstraction, and one poet might adopt the others' love-verses with few
changes of words for any manifest difference in them of personal
feeling.
Not so with Dante. The "Vita Nuova," although retaining many ideas,
forms, and expressions derived from earlier poets, is his, and could be
the work of no other. Nor was he unaware of this difference between
himself and those that had gone before him, or ignorant of its nature.
In describing himself to Buonagiunta da Lucca in Purgatory, he says, "I
am one who, when Love breathes, mark, and according as he dictates
within, I report"; to which the poet of Lucca replies, "O brother, now
I see the knot which kept the Notary and Guittone and me back from that
sweet new style which now I hear.
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