New Life, The (La vita nuova)

One of Dante's earliest works, La vita nuova or La vita nova (The New Life) is in a prosimetrum style, a combination of prose and verse, and tells the story of his youthful love for Beatrice. The prose creates the illusion of narrative continuity between the poems; it is Dante's way of reconstructing himself and his art in terms of his evolving sense of the limitations of courtly love (the system of ritualized love and art that Dante and his poet-friends inherited from the Provençal poets, ...