Background
Guido Cavalcanti was born in Florence of a Guelph family about 1250. In his childhood he was affianced to Beatrice, daughter of Manente degli Uberti, called Farinata, the Ghibelline leader, as one of the moves made to restore peace between Ghibellines and Guelphs. When the Florentine Guelphs divided, Cavalcanti joined the Whites, Dante's party, against the Blacks, and played an active role in party strife. Dante had dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti, his "first friend"; in 1300, however, as one of the city priors, Dante joined in exiling him, along with others, from Florence. This move deprived both factions in the general city council of their leaders and attempted to reduce the strife between the parties. In exile at Sarzana, Cavalcanti fell ill with malaria; he was readmitted to Florence but died toward the end of August.
Career
Cavalcanti's poetry, which Dante praises in the Purgatorio as surpassing the glory of Guinizelli, and which subsequent criticism considers second only to Dante's in its presentation of the dolce stil nuovo ("sweet new style"), falls into two categories. Many of his lyrics, in the first place, are akin to traditional popular poetry, but they are characterized by a greater refinement of vocabulary than Guinizelli's, a tone of greater elevation, and sometimes a new life and vigor as compared with their conventional models. Other poems deal with love from the philosophical approach of the dolce stil nuovo, notably the doctrinal canzone, Donna me prega, which stands out with the authority of a manifesto among Cavalcanti's works. Cavalcanti here pretends that a lady begged him for answers to eight questions about the nature of love, which he answers dryly in scholastic and scientific fashion, using as his authority Albertus Magnus. Here the rationalizing Cavalcanti has made love an affair of the mind and regarded its object as an abstraction. Cavalcanti undoubtedly helped Dante to formulate his conception of Beatrice, but Beatrice remained a real person in the Divina Commedia.