Dante at the end of Vita Nuova

I have recently been digging into Dante, which, I am ashamed to say, I have never really explored previously.  I started with Inferno, and then returned to an earlier work, La Vita Nuova (“The New Life”).  A question that is preoccupying me is the extent to which Dante develops the idea of the self in his poetry. 

Dante encountering Beatrice

This is a notion that one might read consistent with the Catholic western tradition of Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions.  This is a religious meditation that has, among other things, as its effect the production of religious autobiography for spiritually edifying purposes, both within oneself and within others.  On the other hand, there can be a tendency to read Dante, and particularly the Commedia with such a concern for “self-actualization” or “self-discovery” that it seems like Dante’s concern is more naturally at home in the Enlightenment or later French existentialism than in Renaissance Italy.  About this I am suspicious, but still undecided.

At the end of Vita Nuova, which preceded the publication of The Divine Comedy by at least 13 years, what portrait of Dante emerges?  What do we learn about the pre-Inferno Dante?

We glimpse in the Vita Nuova a poet who, on the one hand, is still enamored of Beatrice as he was at the beginning of his prosimetrum work of courtly love, but who, on the other hand, seems confused about her and his relationship to her.  Indeed, he seems confused about himself.

In chapter 42 we read of his fixation and vision; we also read of his uncertainty how to describe or to understand this view of Beatrice:

After I wrote this sonnet there came to me a miraculous vision in which I saw things that made me resolve to say no more about this blessed one until I would be capable of writing about her in a nobler way. To achieve this I am striving as hard as I can, and this she truly knows. Accordingly, if it be the pleasure of Him through whom all things live that my life continue for a few more years, I hope to write of her that which has never been written of any other woman.

Not only does Dante seem to believe that the late Beatrice still has consciousness (“and this she truly knows” -- present tense).  He also seems to reflect either his own poetic incapacity at present to write of her or his uncertainty about what it all means:  “until I would be capable of writing about her in a nobler way.”  Does “in a nobler way” mean his poetic technique?  Or does it refer to his own disposition and needing to mature in his feelings and expression beyond the raw and still searching emotions that he has now?  Or both?

When he does write about her again later in the Commedia, will she still be the object of his desire? Or will his desires have changed, his preoccupations? 

It may be, as it seems to me, that in both the Vita Nuova and the later Commedia, in their own respective ways, Beatrice serves the purpose of helping Dante to give voice to his own misgivings about his life and its proper direction.

At the end of Vita Nuova, in any event, Dante still seems to be searching for himself and his voice.  In other words, he seems to be searching for a beginning, a new life of poetic and self expression.