Torquato Tasso

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Tasso, Torquato

 

Born Mar. 11, 1544, in Sorrento; died Apr. 25,1595, in Rome. Italian poet; son of the poet B. Tasso.

Tasso graduated from the University of Bologna in 1565. In 1572 he became the court poet of Alfonso II d’Este, duke of Ferrara. Influenced by the Counter-Reformation, Tasso renounced philosophical skepticism; he developed a morbid religiosity and a persecution complex. From 1579 to 1586, on the duke’s order, he was confined in a hospital for the insane. In the last years of his life he wandered the cities of Italy.

Tasso’s works combined traits of the Renaissance style with those of the succeeding styles of classicism and the baroque. His Renaissance nature and love lyrics of the 1560’s and early 1570’s gave way to naturalistic, hyperbolic baroque poetry, written between 1579 and 1586. Tasso’s pastoral drama Aminta (1573, published 1580), imbued with a pantheistic perception of the world and an awareness of the power of love, was a Renaissance work with a tendency toward classicism. The treatise Discourses on the Poetic Art (1565–66, published 1587) and its second version, Discourses on the Heroic Poem (1594), based on Aristotle’s poetics, constituted the theoretical basis of Tasso’s new mixed genre, which combined the classical epic with the chivalric narrative poem of L. Ariosto.

Tasso’s chief work was the historical narrative poem Goffredo(written 1574–75), published in full as Jerusalem Delivered (1580; Russian translation by D. Min, vols. 1–3,1900). While the poem dealt with the First Crusade, it also reflected the military clashes taking place during the 1570’s between the European nations and the Turks. It contrasted the principles of humanism and individualism, typical of the Renaissance, and the ethics of the Counter-Reformation. Tasso’s poetic model was the Iliad. The poem’s second version, Jerusalem Conquered (1593), reflected an orthodox Catholic viewpoint. Tasso’s works influenced Western European literature of the 17th and 18th centuries, and the figure of Tasso appeared in works by Goethe, Byron, and K. N. Batiushkov.

WORKS

Opere, vols. 1–33. Edited by G. Rosini. Pisa, 1821–32.
Tuttelepoesie. Edited by L. Caretti. [Milan, 1957.]
Opere[vols. 1–2. Milan, 1961–68].
In Russian translation:
Aminta. Moscow-Leningrad, 1937.

REFERENCES

Rozanov, M. Pushkin, Tasso, Aretino. [Moscow-Leningrad, 1937.]
De Sanctis, F. Istoriia ital’ianskoi literatury, vol. 2. Moscow, 1964.
Mokul’skii, S. S. Ital’ianskaia literatura: Vozrozhdenie i Prosveshchenie. Moscow, 1966.
Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 4. Edited by E. Cecchi and N. Sapegno. [Milan, 1966.]

N. G. ELINA

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.