Torquato Tasso Biography and List of Works

The greatest Italian poet of the late Renaissance, best remembered for his masterpiece LA GERUSALEMME LIBERATA (Jerusalem Delivered, 1575). Its hero is the leader of the first Crusade, Godfrey of Bouillon; its climax is the capture of the holy city. In the 1570s Tasso developed a persecution mania, which led to legends about the restless, half-mad, and misunderstood author. He died a few days before he was due to be crowned as the king of poets by the Pope. Tasso remained one of the most widely read poets among educated Europeans until the beginning of the 19th century.

Io, ch'altre volte fui nelle amorose
insidie colto, or ben le riconosco,
e le discopro, o giovinetti, a voi.
(from 'Quel labbro che le rose han colorito')

Torquato Tasso was born in Sorrento. The family had branches all over Europe, notably the Taxis family in Germany. Tasso attended a Jesuit school in Naples, and was also educated at home by his father, Bernardo Tasso, himself a distinguished man of letters, a poet-courtier, who had been exiled from Naples and held posts here and there. Tasso continued his education in various Italian cities, notably in Urbino, where he studied at the court of Duke Guidobaldo II delle Rovere. His first major work, the narrative poem RINALDO, appeared when he was 18 years old. The work was dedicated to Cardinal d'Este. From 1560 to 1565 he studied law and philosophy at the universities of Padua and Bologna. One of Tasso's friends in Padua was Scipio Gorzaga, later a famous cardinal, whose help meant much to Tasso. In Ferrara he entered the service of Cardinal Luigi d'Este, and later his brother, Duke Alfonso II, as poet-in-residence. During this time he wrote the pastoral drama AMINTA (1573), and La Gerusalemme liberata, composed between 1559 and 1575. Tasso had left his first love in Padua, but he then fell in love with Lucrezia Benedidio, who eventually married Machiavelli .

After finishing his masterwork, Tasso began to suffer from mental problems - his sensitive nature was racked by doubts about the critical and religious orthodoxy of his work and by suspicions of hostility toward him on the part of patrons and friends. Tasso had travelled with Cardinal d'Este to France, and when King Charles IX praised his work, he answered with an undiplomatic remark about toleration of Protestants at the court. This disastrous journey became the basis of Tasso's mental health problems. He couldn't tolerate criticism, feared assassins, negotiated with the Medicis, who were the enemy of the house of Este, and attacked a servant with a knife. He didn't stay long in one place, and when Alfonso was getting married, he shouted curses in public. Finally in 1579 he was declared insane and he spent seven years in the hospital of Santa Anna by order of the duke. During this time Tasso wrote a number of philosophical and moral dialogues, and was visited in the middle of his misery by Montaigne.

He was released in 1586 on condition that he would leave Ferrara, but never totally regained his sanity At the same time he found himself honoured for his Jerusalem, which had gained huge popularity. Despite his further wanderings in Italy from court to court, the unhappy, paranoid, and poverty-stricken Tasso completed a tragedy, TORRISMONDO (1586) and a poem about creation, IL MONDO CREATO (1609). He completed and revised a version of his masterpiece, called Jerusalem Conquered, to meet critical and ecclesiastical objections.

In 1594 Tasso was invited to Rome by Pope Clement VIII to be crowned Italy's Poet Laureate. However, Tasso became seriously ill and died in Rome on April 25, 1595 before he could accept the honour. Among Tasso's other works are some 2 000 short poems, including sonnets and madrigals. He wrote letters, dialogues, the tragedy RE TORRISMONDO (1587), and the theoretical restatement of ancient theories of poetry, DISCORSI DEL POEMA EROICO (1594). From the time of Edward Fairfax's translation into English of Jerusalem Delivered (1594, 1600), Tasso strongly influenced English poets, from Spencer, who used Tasso's sonnets in many of his Amoretti, to Byron, whose The Lament of Tasso is based on the legend of Tasso's passion for Leonora d'Este.

O VUA PIÙ BIANCA E FREDDA

O via più bianca e fredda
di lei che spesso fa parer men belle
col suo splendor le stelle;
turba il suo puro argento
o nube o pioggia o vento
nulla il tuo bel candore: e i vaghi giri
s' in me tu lieta giri
sia la mia vita un sogno ed io contento

La Gerusalemme liberata: The heroic poem depicts in 20 songs the First Crusade, which recovered Jerusalem from the Turks in 1099. Tasso mixes imaginary characters with real historical figures; among the most interesting are the heroes Rinaldo and Tancredi, and their Saracen ladies Armida and Clorinda. - Tasso continued to rewrite his work and in 1593 produced a sequel, GERUSALEMME CONQUISTATA, which was judged a failure. In his work APOLOGIA IN DIFESA DELLA GERUSALEMME LIBERATA Tasso defends himself against accusations that there was too much magic and romance in Jerusalem Delivered. - Models: Homer and Virgil's Aeneid; chivalric romances: see also Cervantes's Don Quixote

O heavenly Muse, that not with fading bays
Deckest thy brow by the Heliconian spring,
But sittest crowned with stars' immortal rays In
Heaven, where legions of bright angels sing;
Inspire life in my wit, my thoughts upraise,
My verse ennoble, and forgive the thing,
If fictions light I mix with truth divine,
And fill these lines with other praise than thine.
(from Jerusalem Delivered)

For further reading: Tasso and Milton: The Problem of Christian by Judith A. Kates (1984) - Corneille, Tasso and Modern Poetics by A. Donald Sellstrom (1986) - Gender and Genealogy in Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata by Marilyn Migiel (1993) - Three Renaissance Pastorals: Tasso, Guarini, Daniel, ed. by Elizabeth Story Donno, et al (1993) - Torquato Tasso in Deutschland by Achim Aurnhammer (1995) - see also Goethe's work about Tasso - Note: Goethe stated in his play Torquato Tasso (1790), that Tasso was imprisoned for daring to love Duke Alfonso's sister Leonora d'Este, but Angelo Solerti's biography of the poet (1895) corrected this myth. Donizzetti's opera (1833) was also based on the legend. - See also: Ariosto

RINALDO, (1562)