Dante's Poetics of Love: Some Remarks about the <i>Commedia</i> and Its Vernacular Context

Abstract

Scholars have long noted the strong sense of continuity among the various works produced by Dante. The Convivio, for example, attaches itself to the Vita Nuova as the continuation of Dante's transition from Beatrice to the donna gentile; and the Commedia is generally associated v^^ith the vision of Beatrice to which Dante alludes at the end of the Vita Nuova. Throughout the Commedia, finally, Dante is recognized by many as the famous Florentine poet; the text contains innumerable references to his poetic practices and to his previous works, associating this body of texts as the work of an individual. The effect of this program of references to Dante's poetic oeuvre and to his system of poetics is, first of all, to set up a picture of Dante's development as poet. In the course of the Cornmedia, Dante comments upon his various poetic works and reviews them from the new perspective of the Commedia, written— we are asked to believe — after the conversion experience it records. Secondly, the Commedia suggests an organic relationship between the succession of poetic texts, and the personal life and internal development of the man who produced them. The story of the Commedia— it must be stressed— is one of both personal and poetic conversion. The moral, intellectual, and spiritual growth of the poet-pilgrim is paralleled by the creation of the poetic language capable of recording and furthering the journey. Giuseppe Mazzotta offers an excellent analysis of Dante's famous explication of the dolce stil novo in Purgatorio XXIV. ^ By associating this passage with the account of the generation of the human being in Purgatorio XXV, and with the description of the Trinity in Paradiso X, Mazzotta shows that, for Dante, poetic production operated analogously to the mystery of Divine Creation and, ultimately, the Incarnation. As Mazzotta states, the artistic