Dante and Glück ... (continued...)

How is Thanatos confronted by Dante and Glück in "Vita Nova"?

Dante, the poet, plunges into a state of deep melancholy

and continues to live like a living dead man. He stops eating,

thinking, and feeling. He stops writing sonnets and lyrics.

The equilibrium between his heart that contains his intellect

and his liver that contains his desire had been ruptured by loss.

He can come out of his lethargic state when he notices the pity

another screen lady feels for him. The sight of the Florentine

noble women whom he calls screen ladies (because they disguise

love behind their screens) prompts Dante to write the "Vita Nova".

Pity reminds him of Love. In Dante's "Vita Nova" both Pity and Love

are both personified by Beatrice and the vision of the final screen lady

that pitied the poet's despair. Glück in "Vita Nova" states that pity

is what comes nearest to irony. I think the resemblance of these

two affective states is a defence against life's bitterness.

I cannot help but think of the disruption of Dante's synthetic state of being

that plunges Glück into the limits of a split between her body and mind

before the objectification of her poetry that unifies both

albeit virtually on paper by words. Glück, the poetess,

assumes the temporary combined persona of Orpheus and Eurydice

to delve into the despair inflicted by her divorce. According

to Kleinian psychoanalysis, the poetess would need to carry the dangerous

shield of the combined parent, so very terrifying to children, to cope

with her wounds. Yet, both Dante and Glück write out of the void

that they experience through loss. Perhaps, this is the irony

that both poets defend themselves against the void by writing about it.

Paradoxically, both creations are the result of the experience

of the void caused by the despair into which they descend

through their death-drive. Would, perhaps, both "Vita Nova",

in fact, be the screens that defend both poets from their death-drive?