Arnaut Daniel (1150 - ) France Arnaut Daniel de Riberac (today Arnaut Danièl) was an Occitan troubadour of the 12th century, praised by Dante as "il miglior fabbro" (the better craftsman/creator, literally "the better smith") and called "Grand Master of Love" by Petrarch.[1] In the 20th century he was lauded as the greatest poet to have ever lived by Ezra Pound in his work The Spirit of Romance (1910).
According to one vida, Daniel was born of a noble family at the castle of Ribérac in Périgord; however, the scant contemporary sources point to him being a jester with pernicious economic troubles. Raimon de Durfort calls him 'a student, ruined by dice and shut-the-box'. He was the inventor of the sestina, a song of six stanzas of six lines each, with the same end words repeated in every stanza, though arranged in a different and intricate order. 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.