Vita Nuova

Dante's putative subject is Beatrice/Love-but the Vita Nuova is really an exercise in poetry: Dante sets the emotional scene for a poem, then he writes the poem, then he explains the poem's structure, part by part. The work shows what we recognize today as a literary attitude, a critical stance on a piece of writing. His precision in thinking about how thoughts ought to be organized may seem pedantic, yet this is the mind that later engaged the question of what Hell might look like, and why and how, not from a religious point of view but as an extended imaginative venture.