Complete Works of Dante Alighieri

2607 Pages·2012·23.29 MB·English

by  Dante Alighieri

DANTE ALIGHIERI
(1265-1321)

Contents
The Poetry Collections
THE NEW LIFE
THE DIVINE COMEDY (VERSE)
THE DIVINE COMEDY (PROSE)
The Italian Texts
LIST OF WORKS
The Biography
DANTE: HIS TIMES AND HIS WORK by Arthur John Butler
© Delphi Classics 2012
Version 1

DANTE ALIGHIERI
By Delphi Classics, 2012
NOTE
When reading poetry on an eReader, it is advisable to use a small font size,
which will allow the lines of poetry to display correctly.
The Poetry Collections
Dante’s birthplace, Florence
Medieval Florence by Giorgio Vasari
Florence today
THE NEW LIFE
Translated by Charles Eliot Norton
La Vita Nuova is a collection of verse and prose works written in 1295 by the
Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321). Forming an expression of the
medieval genre of courtly love, the collection was innovative for being written in
Italian, instead of Latin – the favoured language of high literature at the time. As
well as the poet’s other works, La Vita Nuova helped to establish the Tuscan
dialect, promoting an Italian language that could be appreciated by readers of all
backgrounds and not just the privileged few.
The work contains 42 short chapters, with commentaries on 25 sonnets and
several other rarer forms of poems. In the prose sections, Dante constructs a
narrative of sorts between the poems; recounting his encounters with Beatrice, a
young Florentine maiden he meets and falls in love with at first sight. As the
poet discusses the origins and context of each poem, he also explains, often in
meticulous detail, his technical decisions in composition. The chapters
containing poems are composed of three parts: the semi-autobiographical
narrative, the lyric that resulted from those circumstances and a brief structural
outline of the lyric.
La Vita Nuova was written with the purpose to elevate courtly love poetry,
transposing its tropes and its language into a sacred form of love poetry. The
collection is a landmark work in the development of emotional autobiography,
finely delineating feelings of courtly love, as well as presenting an
unprecedented insight of a poet’s workmanship.
A portrait of Dante attributed to Giotto