Amongst many others are Pope Martin IV. and the poet Bonagiunta of Lucca, whose talk with Dante upon the _dolce stil nuovo_, the “sweet new style,” is one of the landmarks for the student of poetry (_Purg._ xxiv. 49-60). Dante’s famous definition of his own position expresses, in another form, the truth that all great poetry is the “transfigured life” of its author:[35] “I am one who, when Love inspires me, note, and give utterance in that fashion which he dictates within.” It is already anticipated in the prose passage prefixed to the _Donne che avete_ in the _Vita Nuova_ (xix.), and completes the conception of poetry set forth in the _De Vulgari Eloquentia_. THE SEVENTH TERRACE.--Passing another tree, a shoot from the tree of knowledge, beneath which the purging pangs are renewed, and from whose branches spirit voices proclaim examples of gluttony’s punishment, they are summoned upwards by the glowing and dazzling Angel of Abstinence, fragrant with grass and flowers as the air of May. As they ascend the narrow stairs towards the last terrace, Statius explains the generation of the body and the infusion of the rational soul, which exists, after the body’s death, invested with an aerial body as a shade (_Purg._ xxv. 31 _et seq._). Apparently it is because revelation has some voice in these high matters that the Christian Statius gives Dante this exposition, instead of Virgil, and at the latter’s request; until the seventh terrace is reached, where sensual passion is expiated in the bosom of the great burning. Singing to the God of Supreme Clemency, crying aloud examples of chastity or of lust’s punishment, two bands of souls, divided according to the nature of their sin, pass through the fire in opposite ways (_Purg._ xxvi.). Here is Guido Guinizelli of Bologna, father of the poets of the _dolce stil nuovo_, whom Dante gazes upon in rapt admiration, and addresses with impassioned love and worship. But Guinizelli--with that humility which is so characteristically Dante’s own--indicates as _miglior fabbro del parlar materno_, a “better craftsman of his mother-tongue,” Arnaut Daniel, the cunning Provençal song-smith, who invented the sestina, and whose metrical skill and originality won for him a higher place in the estimation of the poet of the _rime pietrose_ than modern students of the troubadours are usually disposed to concede.