Every Love Story Needs to be Told Twice: Dante’s Vita Nuova Studio

Create poetry inspired by the beautifully intense world of Dante Alighieri’s masterpiece of love, passion, and loss: the Vita Nuova.

The Vita Nuova tells the story of Dante’s love for Beatrice, a fellow Florentine and the woman who will become his eternal muse. It is a heartbreaking story of intense love, desire and grief, evoking a series of vivid dreams and dark hallucinations, in which each major episode is told twice: in short prose and poetry. During the course, we will be reading key episodes from the Vita Nuova, taking them as starting points in our own individual creative process.

Week one: Between Reality and Dream
The world of the Vita Nuova oscillates between dream and reality. As readers, we often find ourselves moving between Dante’s dreams and his interpretations of them as he walks in the streets of Florence. The first assignment will focus on two of Dante’s most intense and vivid dreams: one in which his heart is taken out of his body and held by Beatrice, and another in which Dante foresees Beatrice’s death. We will learn from Dante about the power of moving between the realms of dream and reality when creating new work and will explore the different ways we can turn a short dream episode into a tantalising image in our own poetry.

Week two: Every Heartbreak Needs to be Written Twice
Each chapter of the Vita Nuova is written in poetry and prose, often telling the same episode twice: first in short prose, then in verse. Dante shows us that sometimes the experiences we go through are so overwhelming, we simply need to explore them in more than one form in order to cope with their magnitude. During the second week, we will discuss the role of different writing forms when evoking strong emotions and life-changing experiences. We will focus on two key chapters from the Vita Nuova and explore the dramatic effects created by telling the same story twice.

Week three: Love and Grief
In the final week, we will focus on Dante’s exploration of grief following Beatrice’s death. Towards the end of the Vita Nuova, Dante’s grief seems to affect everything around him. Even the city of Florence becomes a widow in Dante’s eyes, in reaction to Beatrice’s death. We will discuss how profound grief can affect the way we see the world around us, and will experiment with the different ways we can evoke loss in our poetry, including when referring to the places we live in. Finally, we will explore the links between deep love and profound grief, and how we can evoke them in short and intense poems.

Studios are 4-week intensive courses. Reading material will be distributed before the course begins. There are no live chats so they are suitable for both UK & International students.

Concessions & Accessibility

To apply for a concession rate, please send relevant documentation showing your eligibility for one of our concessions to [email protected]. Conditions of eligibility are detailed here. If you have any questions or wish to be added to the waiting list of a sold-out course, please email [email protected].

What to Expect

Please check the left hand side of this page for information on how this course works in practice, under the heading ‘Course Style‘. If you’re unsure as to what any of the terms there mean, or if this course is a good fit for you, please visit our What to Expect page which includes some further information on how our courses function.

Image credit: @paulglucaci

About Stav Poleg View Profile

Stav Poleg is a writer, poetry editor, and creative writing tutor. Her second poetry collection, The Banquet (Carcanet, 2025) engages with the work of Dante, Rimbaud, and Wittgenstein, and was shortlisted for the PEN Heaney Prize 2025. Her debut poetry collection, The City (Carcanet, 2022) was chosen for the Financial Times’ Best Summer Books 2022 and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize for First Collection, 2023. Her poetry has appeared on both sides of the Atlantic, in The New Yorker, Poetry Daily, Poetry London, Poetry Ireland Review, PN Review, and elsewhere. Her work is featured in leading anthologies, including A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker (Knopf, 2025), The Forward Book of Poetry (Faber, 2024), and New Poetries VIII (Carcanet, 2021). Her graphic-novel installation, ‘Dear Penelope: Variations on an August Morning’, created with artist Laura Gressani, was acquired by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Her theatre work was read at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, and the Shunt Vaults, London, and most recently at Kettle’s Yard gallery, Cambridge. She teaches for the Poetry School on a range of subjects including poetry inspired by the Divine Comedy, the Odyssey and the cinema of Fellini.

"I've been inspired to write and have had new poems published, I've discovered new ways of approaching poetry, and felt part of a community. Tutor feedback has really helped my confidence."

– Autumn 2025 Survey Response

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