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Dante first saw Beatrice when they were both nine years old, and he spent the rest of his life writing about her. The New Life, finished around 1295, tells…
Dante first saw Beatrice when they were both nine years old, and he spent the rest of his life writing about her. The New Life, finished around 1295, tells that story in short prose chapters that frame his own early poems: her greeting in the street, the pain of being ignored, the screen ladies he pretended to love, his dreams and her early death in 1290.
Context and significance
The book ends with a promise to write of Beatrice what had never been written of any woman, a promise kept in The Divine Comedy. It is short, strange and tender, one of the first books in which a poet explains his own poems, and a key to the whole of Dante.
About the author
Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) was born in Florence and, as a boy of nine, saw Beatrice Portinari, the woman who would inspire his poetry for the rest of his life, as he tells in La Vita Nuova. He became a poet, a soldier and a politician, and in 1302 was exiled by his political enemies under threat of death.
He never returned to Florence. In exile, moving between the courts of northern Italy, he wrote The Divine Comedy, placing friends and enemies in Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. He died in Ravenna, where he is buried, and the city of Florence still keeps an empty tomb for him.