Deconstruction

Guido Cavalcanti (c. 1255–1300), a prominent Florentine poet, was celebrated by contemporaries for his innovative lyrical style. His work frequently depicted love as a painful, agonising experience, a destructive force, originating from the senses or, ultimately, according to his famous doctrinal poem “A Lady Implores Me”, from the dark influence of the planet Mars. Accordingly, Cavalcanti’s poetry, marked by bleak imagery and a language of negation, internalises the gallant display of erotic devotion, portraying it as a brutal psychodrama where the beloved lady becomes the tormentor and the speaker her irremediable victim. In short, Cavalcanti’s sonnets and ballads, influenced by Aristotelian/Averroistic philosophy, optics, medicine, and physics, depict love as an irrational, sensually compromised passion, opening the prospect of disintegration and ruin.