Daniel, Arnaut (lived 1180-1200)

French poet, one of the Provençal troubadours. His output consists almost entirely of love songs, notable for their delicacy of sentiment, the extreme refinement and complexity of their verse forms, and, in particular, the stylistic effects derived from unusual vocabulary and difficult rhymes.

He invented the verse form of the sestina, or sextain. The Italian poet Dante judged him the most skilful of the troubadours, a view echoed in the twentieth century by US poet Ezra Pound.