Love In La Vita Nuova By Dantes Inferno

Dante Alighieri was born in 1265 in Florence, Italy, into a moderate wealth household. In his late twenties, Dante Alighieri wrote the Vita Nuova around 1292, during a period when he began studying philosophy and intensified his political involvement in Florence. Dante held multiple significant public offices in Italy. In 1302, at the age of 35, Dante was exiled from Florence by the leaders of the Black Guelphs, the political faction in power at the time. During this time, Dante wrote Inferno. Throughout both Inferno and La Vita Nuova, Dante develops the story through the use of themes such as love’s motivation, the conflict in god vs man, in which he demonstrates his strong religious influence, and the power of storytelling, in which he also

Details of her life remain uncertain, but in La Vita Nuova, Dante describes how he fell in love with her as a young man. Although Dante married another woman, he continued to yearn for her after her sudden death. La Vita Nuova describes this tragic love for Beatrice, stating “Love quite governed my soul… an exultation of Love to subdue me,” (p.26). Dante continues, expressing how “love many times assailed [him] so suddenly and with such strength that [he] had no other life remaining… love did battle with me in this wise, I would rise up all colourless, if so I might see my lady, conceiving that the sight of [Beatrice] would defend [him] against the assault of love, and altogether forgetting that which her presence brought unto [him]” (p.67, Vita Nuova). Meanwhile, Beatrice’s role in Inferno is more limited. Even so, Dante’s entire journey through the afterlife aims to find Beatrice. In the Inferno, Beatrice is more of a symbolic representation of spiritual love. Dante describes Beatrice as a divine love when he writes, “Beatrice am I, who do bid thee go; I come from there, where I would fain return; Love moved me, which compelleth me to speak.”

In La Vita Nuova, Dante simply directly alludes to the “the Greeks, [who] were not writers of spoken language, but men of letters, treated of these things.” (). Dante compare and contrasts his expressions in his love poem to that of “Virgil, where he saith that Juno (to wit, a goddess hostile to the Trojans) spake unto Aeolus, master of the Winds; as it is written in the first book of the Aeneid,...In Horace, man is made to speak to his own intelligence as unto another person; (and not only hath Horace done this, but herein he followeth the excellent Homer), as thus in his Poetics.” (). In Inferno, rather than just mentioning classical literature, Dante includes the authors and characters from Greek Mythology instead. He writes of “Centaurs in file… running, armed with arrows,” () and of “the great Chiron, who brought up Achilles” (). Dante then recognizes “both Hector and Aeneas, Caesar in armour with gerfalcon eyes” (). Specifically, Dante incorporates Virgil, his favorite author, as his personal guide to redemption. As a whole, the majority of the Inferno and La Vita Nuova is inspired from past pieces of Greek and Latin literature and alludes to them in