Editing Arnaut Daniel (section)

==Work and style==
The dominant characteristic of Daniel's poetry is an extreme obscurity of thought and expression, a style called ''trobar clus'' ('hermetic verse').<ref name=":0">{{Cite web|url=https://dante.dartmouth.edu/search_view.php?doc=200052261150&cmd=gotoresult&arg1=14|access-date=2021-03-14|website=dante.dartmouth.edu}}</ref> He belonged to one school of troubadour poets that sought to make their meanings difficult to understand through the use of unfamiliar words and expressions, enigmatical allusions, complicated meters and uncommon rhyme schemes.<ref>Smythe, 105</ref> Daniel further invented a form of stanza in which no lines rhymed with each other, finding their rhymes only in the corresponding line of the next stanza.<ref>Smythe, 105</ref>

Daniel was the inventor of the [[sestina]], a song of six [[stanza]]s of six lines each, with the same end words repeated in every stanza, though arranged in a different and intricate order. [[Henry Wadsworth Longfellow]] claims he was also the author of the metrical romance of ''[[Lancillotto]]'', or ''[[Launcelot of the Lake]]'', but this claim is completely unsubstantiated; Dante's reference to Daniel as the author of ''prose di romanzi'' ("proses of romance") remains, therefore, a mystery. There are sixteen extant lyrics of Arnaut Daniel only one of which can be accurately dated, to 1181.<ref>Smythe, 108</ref> Of the sixteen there is music for at least one of them, but it was composed at least a century after the poet's death by an anonymous author. No original melody has survived.