We talk about "the Dante poet" and "the Dante character", but we use a different expression to say "the Beowulf poet"...it's a bit hard to explain or to translate, because basically it's a very slight difference due to the different linguistic system. It could be like "the Dante poet" and "the poet OF Beowulf". In English, if you say "the Beowulf poet", you could mean both the author of Beowulf or (just a supposition) that some Beowulf was the author of something. In Italian the linguistical ambivalence of this expression doesn't exist, thus there's no possibility of getting confused with the concept. Hmm..hope this makes sense!