The Secretest Chamber of the Heart: The Vita Nuova in British and American Modernism

The chapter discusses the features and specificities of the reception of the Vita Nuova in the context of British and American Modernism, focussing on the elements present in Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. Exploring the relationship three major Modernist authors entertain with the work entails following a set of interlaced trajectories which range from the dynamics among the three writers to the wider angle of Dante’s reception in the anglophone world. As the chapter shows, two key elements appear to traverse and connect Pound’s and Eliot’s, as well as Woolf’s more oblique reception of the Vita Nuova: a discourse on language which becomes interlaced with the conception of writing as a process transforming personal into universal experience and meaning.