Peter Hughes has taken Guido Cavalcanti's groundbreaking poems and used them as springboards for his own creative versions. Cavalcanti was a 13th-century Tuscan poet who brought an extraordinary intensity and craft to his explorations of the social and psychological dimensions of love. He employed the Tuscan vernacular and helped create a new poetry which belonged to the city rather than the court. He has had a significant influence on English poetry through the translations of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (first published in 1861) and then through the work of Ezra Pound.