Tasso, Torquato (1544-1595)

Italian poet. He was the author of the romantic epic poem of the First Crusade Gerusalemme liberata/Jerusalem Delivered completed by 1575 and first published in 1581, which he revised as Gerusalemme conquistata/Jerusalem Conquered, published in 1593.

Tasso was born at Sorrento in southern Italy. As a boy accompanied he his father, the poet Bernado Tasso, into political exile, spending a short time at the court of Urbino and studying at the universities of Padua and Bologna. In these early years he produced Rinaldo (1562), a chivalric romance. In 1565 he joined the retinue of Cardinal Luigi d'Este, who took him to Paris, where he was influenced by the works of the Pléiade group of poets. In 1572 Duke Alfonso II d'Este appointed him court poet at Ferrara, where his play Aminta was performed in the summer of 1573. By 1575 he had completed the first of his many versions of his epic Gerusalemme libertata.

Soon afterwards he betrayed signs of the mental instability that remained with him for the rest of his life. In 1577, after a violent outburst in the presence of Lucrezia d'Este, he was briefly confined: two years later after abusing Duke Alfonso in public, he was confined in the hospital of Sant'Anna from 1579-86. After his release (authorized by Alfonso), he continued his wanderings, though now with the protection of prominent men and women and welcomed by various academies and religious orders. He finally settled at the monastery of Sant'Onofrio in Rome, dying before his coronation as poet laureate, which Pope Clement VIII had intended for him, could take place.

His other works include almost 2000 letters; 28 dialogues on a wide range of subjects; Discorsi del poema eroico/Treatise on Epic Poetry (1594), a critical study that throws light on his own poetry; the play Torrismondo (1587), based on the tragedy Oedipus Rex by the ancient Greek poet Sophocles; Rime, consisting of over 1000 of his shorter poems; and the long poem in blank verse Le sette gionate del mondo creato/The Seven Days of the Creation.