ABSTRACT
Dante’s stony rhymes in particular are strongly colored by the physical sciences and by a more material approach to love that tugs against its tendency toward spiritual idealization. Dante’s newfound technique links with a larger Neoplatonic poetics based on correspondences between the macrocosm of the universe and the microcosm of the human body. Nevertheless, Dante’s attempt to assimilate Arnaut’s poetry is first concentrated into his “rime petrose,” his “stony rhymes,” named after the “stony woman” that they address. Dante covers with contempt the foolish presumption of those who think that they can arrive at the highest style of poetic song by ingenuity alone, without art and science. In De vulgari eloquentia, Dante explains that concrete examples from the greatest of poets are indispensable for illustrating the standards and norms of the finest style of composition in the highest form, the canzone, because no fixed formulas or precepts can adequately state them.
