TASSO, TORQUATO. - Born at Sorrento on 11 March 1544 to Bernardo and Porzia de' Rossi, he spent his early childhood in Naples with his mother and sister, whom he left (the former never to see again, and the latter to see again only in 1577 in a romantically adventurous and elegiac encounter) around 1554 to join his father in Rome, an exile since 1552. After a brief stay at Bergamo with his paternal family, he was reunited with his father at Pesaro and Urbino, where, in the refined court of Guidubaldo II della Rovere and in the company of the highly literary Bernardo, he began his experience of courts and letters. In 1559 he was in Venice with Bernardo (who had moved there to oversee the printing of the Amadigi): and there he almost certainly began the composition of the Gierusalemme, the first draft of what was later to be his major poem. Having moved in 1560-61 to Padua to attend to the study of law, he did not abandon what by now was revealed as an irresistible poetic vocation; thus, while writing the first verses dictated by his love for Lucrezia Bendidio and for Laura Peperara, he undertook and brought to completion Il Rinaldo, a poem in twelve cantos in ottava rima, published in Venice in 1562 with his father's permission.
At Padua his literary formation benefited from the conversation and the lectures of Sperone Speroni, of Francesco Piccolomini, of Carlo Sigonio and from the milieu of the Eterei, the Academy founded by Scipione Gonzaga, with whom the poet formed a affectionate friendship. And among the Rime degli Accademici Eterei, in 1567, T. published the first notable group of lyrics. Toward the end of '65, having entered the service of Cardinal Luigi d'Este, he had meanwhile moved to Ferrara. Here, at the Este court, in whose sumptuous life he participated with brilliant success, and in the Ferrarese Academy, in which he was to deliver an oration and read the Discorsi dell'arte poetica and present the fifty Conclusioni d'amore, he developed those two fundamental motifs of his life that take shape around the Court and the Academy, understood as complex meeting places of culture and civilization. In the cardinal's retinue, in 1570-71 he set out for Paris, from where he addressed to Ercole de' Contrari a letter-treatise, thoroughly imbued with a savory geographical taste, on the affairs of France. In '72 he was again at Ferrara, by then in the service of Duke Alfonso II. This is for T. a happy season of poetry; the lyrical production continues, of sonnets, canzoni and madrigals, of love (for Laura Peperara and for Eleonora Sanvitale) and of praise (for Lucrezia and Eleonora, the Duke's sisters); in the spring of 1573 he composes the Aminta, a pastoral fable in five acts; then he begins the Galealto re di Norvegia, a first attempt at a tragedy which, under the changed title of Re Torrismondo, he will complete in 1586-87; and finally in April of '75 «the poem of Goffredo», to which he had been devoting himself for some years with enthusiasm of imagination and assiduity of work, is completed. But already toward the end of that year the first symptoms of imbalance come to disturb the integrity of his body worn out by fatigue and of his mind subjected to excessive tension. The long creative travail was followed by the exhausting work of revising the poem, a work poisoned both by the frenzy that possessed the poet anxious for success and by the disappointment over the criticisms of the poem that reached him from every side, from Scipione Gonzaga, from Sperone Speroni, from Silvio Antoniano, from Flaminio de' Nobili, from Pier Angelo Bargeo, to whose judgment he himself had entrusted his work. Artistic doubts, complicated by religious scruples and by vague fears that were gradually taking the form of a persecution mania, made the dialogue with these revisers ever more tormented. The evocative and sorrowful testimony of this remains in a thick bundle of letters and in the Allegoria della Liberata itself (1576), in which the poet strives to devise a hidden moral meaning for the poem. The examination by the inquisitor, to which he voluntarily submits (at Bologna in 1575 and two years later at Ferrara), with the related absolution, does not suffice to free him from his morbid unease. But the most clamorous manifestation of the illness occurred one evening in June 1577, when, believing himself spied upon during a conversation with the princess Lucrezia, he hurled a knife at a servant. Segregated because of his dangerous frenzy, he escaped under romantic circumstances, and began that sorrowful wandering that introduces a note so restless and tormented and hallucinated into his biography: from Ferrara to Sorrento, to Rome, and again to Ferrara for a few months, with a new departure for Mantua, Padua, Venice, Pesaro, Urbino; and then again to Ferrara, Mantua, Vercelli, Turin. In Feb. 1579 he is back at Ferrara, while at court everyone is occupied with the preparations for the Duke's third marriage to Margherita Gonzaga; so that, neglected and disappointed, in an attack of his illness, on the evening of 11 March he breaks out in violent invectives against his former protector. Shut up and chained as a madman in the hospital of S. Anna, he will spend a full seven years there, treated, as the medical customs of the time dictated, as a prisoner rather than as a sick man, although afterward the original rigor was much attenuated. In S. Anna the poet, in the long intervals of lucidity, resumed his literary occupations and conversation with friends, and meanwhile sought to defend himself against the accusation of madness and to regain his freedom: of the sorrowful and anxious, fervent and feverish existence of this period the letters are documents, some of them deeply human, certainly among the most evocative of the epistolary collection. To these years belong, along with many letters, a good number of lyrics, the Dialoghi and the Apologia della Liberata. And it is from these years of imprisonment that the beginning of the editorial vicissitudes of Tasso's masterpiece dates. Published without the author's knowledge and to his detriment by Celio Malespini in 1580 in Venice under the title of Goffredo in a very incorrect and incomplete edition, republished complete, to remedy the first disastrous edition, the following year by Angelo Ingegneri at Padua and at Casalmaggiore under the title destined to remain of Gerusalemme Liberata, it appeared finally in the same year 1581 in Ferrara, edited by Febo Bonnà with the consent, later repudiated, of T. Meanwhile, in July 1586 the Duke granted Vincenzo Gonzaga permission to take T. with him to Mantua, where the poet completed the Torrismondo and thought about reworking the Gerusalemme. But in Oct. 1587 he suddenly left Mantua, driven by his craving for continual movement: Bergamo, Genoa, Loreto, Rome. From Rome he moved, with the intention of recovering his maternal property, to Naples, where, to please his hosts, the Olivetan monks, he began the Monte Oliveto, a short poem left unfinished at the 102nd octave of the first canto. Toward the end of 1588 he was again in Rome, at the house of Card. Scipione Gonzaga; in 1590 in Florence; in 1592 in Mantua, where he wrote in honor of Duke Vincenzo the Genealogia di casa Gonzaga (119 octaves); in 1592 in Naples, first at the house of the prince of Conca, and then at that of the marquis G. B. Manso, who would be one of his first biographers (and here he undertook Le sette giornate del mondo creato, in blank hendecasyllables, completed in Rome in 1594). In 1593 he published the reworked poem, the Gerusalemme Conquistata, with a dedication to Card. Cinzio Aldobrandini, nephew of Pope Clement VIII, who in Rome in his last years granted him generous hospitality, and he composed Le lagrime di Maria Vergine and Le lagrime di Gesù Cristo (in 25 and 20 octaves respectively). In 1594, in Naples for the last time, he undertook La vita di s. Benedetto (a fragment of 8 stanzas). When the Pope had decreed him a pension, while there was already talk of honoring him with the laurel of poet on the Capitoline, in the first days of Apr. 1595, having left the Vatican, he was received, in grave condition of health, in the monastery of S. Onofrio on the Janiculum. From here, in a calm presentiment of the end, he wrote to Antonio Costantini the celebrated letter with which the epistolary collection closes: «Mi sono fatto condurre in questo munistero [...] quasi per cominciare da questo luogo eminente, e con la conversazione di questi divoti padri, la mia conversazione in cielo». And here he died on 25 Apr. 1595. The poetic crown was placed on his bier. The tomb, a bare stone that was replaced only in 1857 by a modest monument, is in S. Onofrio.
Fairly dense traces of his outward vicissitudes and a vivid image of his inner life have been left by T. in the Lettere (about seventeen hundred), which must nevertheless be interpreted with great discretion, without mistaking their ideal truth for what is particular truth in the historical-archival sense. In them, beneath a dignified literary seal always highly controlled and responsible, the poet has delivered, through a whole series of direct or indirect psychological data, the suggestive voices of his soul aroused by internal and external events. And it is the voice that resounds and takes shape in the court, in that court which is a physical and moral, aesthetic and cultural reality, which regulates and adorns his writing, and justifies his concettismo, and sustains and directs his insistent and painful supplication. But precisely this supplication, which alludes to the suffered condition of perpetual need and restless search of the poet, is among the most frequent and sorrowful notes. Often the feelings of grief, melancholy and death touch these pages, while sighs and anxious gusts of enjoyment and well-being sometimes mingle and alternate in them. Often it is the presence of the poet's own physical person, who presents himself in some more spontaneous attitude; and it is that of the most singular hours of his day; or that, again, wholly exceptional, of a very new experience, which ferments in zones of hallucination and mystery. Connected with the motif of grief and death is the motif of religious experience, which T. confesses in terms of undoubted sincerity, but, one must also recognize, rather poor in contemplative genius and stripped of ascetic anxiety. More vivid and original are the themes that engage the intelligence of profane matters, as happens in certain letters that have the character of objective dissertation, in exemplary fashion in the one on the affairs of France, and in the other to Ercole Tasso on marriage. But above all intense are the notes that touch the critical conscience of the poet and the scholar, which exercises itself vigilant and captious, forcing an assiduous work of control over the poem, of which precisely the trace has remained in the dense group of letters that accompanies the vast elaborative process of the passage from the Liberata to the Conquistata.
Expressions of the broad harmony of the Tassian mind with the critical problems of poetry, in a technical and rhetorical sense, are the youthful Discorsi dell'arte poetica in three books and the mature Discorsi del poema eroico in six books, around which a whole series of other pages unfolds (from the Allegoria della Gerusalemme Liberata to the Apologia in difesa della Gerusalemme Liberata, to the Giudizio sovra la sua Gerusalemme da lui medesimo riformata; from the Considerazioni sopra tre canzoni di M. Giov. Battista Pigna intitolate le Tre Sorelle to the Lezione sopra un sonetto di Mons. Della Casa, to other lesser things). Within the schemes of contemporary literary Aristotelianism and along the line of development that moves from an aesthetics of the hedonistic type to an aesthetics of ethical-pedagogical tone, T. expresses his aspiration to a literature of exception, to a taste solely and academically solemn, to a «parlar grande e magnifico». The true interest of the Discorsi lies in the programmatic and justificatory character of a taste and a poetics. And besides, for anyone able to pass beyond the annoyance of that doctrinal framework and those abstract schemes of Aristotelianism and of the rhetoric of the time (which nevertheless had their own irreplaceable didactic function), it is still granted to catch fresh impressions and to witness the celebration of a genuine literary sensibility. Therefore the Discorsi, while they extensively document T.'s poetic culture and often suggest the key to understanding certain tonalities of his own poetry, testify to his exquisite capacity to understand and remember the poetry of the great authors, from Virgil to Dante, to Petrarch.
The twenty-eight Dialoghi are not a work of philosophy, just as they are not a simple exercise in style, and they are less than ever that work which, in the author's calculation, was supposed to constitute a kind of synthetic philosophical-poetic form.
They are rather to be considered as a work of literature, the result of a synthesis that takes place not between different forms and different spiritual moments, but between contents (or forms lowered to contents) and different motifs and allusions: and where it is not even excluded that one often remains at a mere stitching together of fragments, or at the condition of scattered fragments isolated within an arbitrary frame. On this ground of varied literature there flourishes, together with the demand for orderly and hairsplitting dissertations, the pleasure of colourful descriptive pauses; together with the love of conceited maxims, the exploratory curiosity about certain rare and precious subjects; and the abandonment to autobiographical memory or to affectionate personal confidence; and at times the very vague smile of poetic contemplation. In the frame and the subject matter of the Dialoghi, in their development and in the tonal rhythm that dominates them, one perceives most vividly the exemplary echo of courtly conversations. And in reality they perpetually oscillate between the moralistic and the dilettantish character, between the literary and the worldly accent. The subjects themselves are evidence of this: gambling, honest pleasure, masks, Tuscan poetry, precedence, nobility, the court, imprese, the virtues, love, beauty, etc. Thus the reasoning, in its more strictly logical intent, remains in a zone of aridity stripped of inventive delight, while the more animated attention gathers on the frame of the dialogue, on the serene and luminous or nocturnal and stormy landscape backgrounds, on certain intimate and luxurious interiors, on some beautiful portrait of a woman or, by contrast, on some restless and witch-like vision. Rich in interest are the frequent suggestions that establish a connection with the events of the poet's life and with the cultural motifs of the Counter-Reformation and of the imminent Baroque. Among the Dialoghi it is possible to find the most complete and highest examples of T.'s prose, which are in fact offered by the Messaggero and the Padre di famiglia.
The Rinaldo, which narrates in twelve cantos in ottava rima the deeds of arms and love of the young paladin, marks the true beginning (gathered around a vast, complete and demanding undertaking) of T.'s poetic career. In the youthful poem, composed with the declared intention «partly in imitation of the ancients and partly of the moderns», it is not yet the poet who truly makes his appearance, but the man of letters who tries his professional and imaginative experiments, and, with him, the adolescent who loves to translate into images his taste for action, glory, and love. The Rinaldo is the expression of an autobiographical dream: it amounts to the confession of a youthful dream. In the eponymous hero T. takes pleasure in mirroring himself, secretly enjoying imagining that beautiful optimistic fable as valid for himself; the word cannot develop with fluency, it remains extraneous to an authentic psychological motivation, to a justified thematic development, to a clear figurative process, to a living sense of time and space. Nevertheless the Rinaldo retains a not negligible significance in the history of Tasso's poetic experience. In it certain fundamental themes and tones make their first appearance. Thus the warrior motif: which gives rise, in its best moments, to a characteristic spectacular taste, accompanied more than once by an affective reaction that stands as a most suggestive elegy of death. Thus, and these are the most intense anticipations of T.'s great poetry, the restless and languid representation of love, the sorrowful expression of the doubtful and restless wandering of the mind, the contemplative pleasure of the rapid alternation of idyllic and luminous landscapes and of backgrounds of darkness and storm. In the youthful poem, in short, T. is still seeking his style, and there is still lacking in it an absolute centre of interest; therefore the value of the Rinaldo seems to gather in certain generic situations, or in isolated motifs, in single verses, or in detached words, which are like the initial symbols of Tasso's future poetry.
Far broader is the significance of the Aminta, the pastoral fable which in five acts narrates Amina's love for the disdainful Silvia. This is a work of complex literature, suspended on a rare equilibrium of poetic technique and of social play, of idyllic dream filtered through a whole tradition and of a sated hedonism eager for new experiences. The critical suggestion of recent and ancient models, of original structure and exquisite workmanship, of the "pastoral" genre acts upon T.'s imagination, and together with it the taste for masquerade and for the perpetual allusive wink at persons and things of the court, and further the desire for escape from court life and the curiosity for a chimerical world of simple existence led close to nature and in harmony with it. From this intricate fabric of stimuli of culture, of civilization and of technique, and from the wise equilibrium of the multiple tones that spring from it, the Aminta derives its exquisitely literary framework and its highly decorative character. In this composition, in which multiple expressive vectors operate, harmonized by a vigilant literary consciousness, there flows a vein of poetry that can be identified in the intuition of love grasped in its most germinal and shadowy forms, in its first unconscious blossoming, in its hidden rooting and ingenuous development, in its timid and shy manner. A fertile nucleus of this poetry acts in the figure of Aminta, upon whom gathers the suggestion that derives from the lyrical analysis of the first unconscious effects of love. But more intensely this poetry expresses itself in the figure of Silvia, in whom are investigated the reasons and the progress that secretly and slowly lead to the explosion of love in a soul averse to it. This figure may be said to obey no other calls than those of the lyrically happy discovery of a nascent sensibility, fixed in its slow process of formation. For this reason Silvia is also the only true character that has a story and a development. Upon this development, indeed, is solely sustained and justified that dramatic movement which has sometimes been denied to the Aminta by criticism.
(Int. Sestini)
T. still remained faithful to the theater in undertaking the Galealto re di Norvegia, soon interrupted and later resumed with the Re Torrismondo. A twofold impulse presided over the composition of this tragedy: one, fully conscious, of a technical-critical order, directed to the application of Aristotle's principles and to the imitation of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex; and another more obscure, of a psychological and fantastic order, intent on arousing a turbid and convulsed pathetic matter, which, while it gathered the suggestions of Seneca's theater, responded to the secret inclination of Tasso's sensibility. In these five acts is developed the theme of incest: an incest, in its intention, of the Oedipal type (understood, that is, as a fatal misfortune that comes unwanted and unforeseen and irreparable) but developed in effect, through unconscious suggestion, according to the type of the incest of Phaedra, that incest which is temptation and sinful reality, consciously present in the soul that does not know how and does not wish to reject it. In this work, more than the characters, among whom nevertheless Alvida is particularly felicitous, one would say the relations between them are felt, which are intricate relations of instinctive attractions and fatal divisions. Among the characters who pass bewildered across the stage there is a continuous opening of abysses. The tragedy seems to recapitulate itself in a ruinous collapse of sweet hopes and of reposeful illusions, which projects itself and refracts in a dark and stormy sky, present in nearly all the images and words of these five acts. If the Aminta represented the flowering of the sweet illusion of love, guarded in a frame of springtime nature, the Torrismondo represents the collapse of this illusion, reflected on a nocturnal background amid clouds and lightning, so that between the two works the inspiration seems to unify and compose itself in the fundamental rhythm of the birth of illusion and its fatal vanishing. And if in the smiling pastoral fable the language flowed harmoniously in a rare equilibrium of recitative shaded into song, here a syncopated language prevails, all interjections and questions, which has its most significant documentation and its richest burden of poetic responsibility in the stupendous final chorus.
The concern for a punctual formal revision, which becomes quite evident and indicative in the passage from the first draft of the tragedy (the Galealto) to the definitive draft (the Torrismondo), assumes a character of vastness and of quite particular intensity within the Rime, which present an extraordinarily intricate system of variants. T.'s care for the Rime (whose chronology initially refers back to a period preceding the Gierusalemme and the Rinaldo) goes from the youthful episode of the collection that appeared among the Rime degli Eterei (1567) to the editions of the Mantuan Prima parte (1591) and of the Brescian Seconda parte (1593) containing respectively the "Amori" and the "Laudi" and "Encomi," which a Terza parte of "Cose sacre" and probably a Quarta of "Rime irregolari" should have followed. The Rime, which establish a perpetual appeal, declared or implicit, to the tradition that moves from Petrarch, represent the most vast and authoritative recapitulation of the preceding lyric, and together, through the wide imitation that Marino and the poets of the seventeenth century will make of them, the starting point of the subsequent lyric. What Petrarch had represented for T., and for the other poets up to him, T. will represent for the poets of the Baroque age and of Arcadia. The interest that springs from the Rime is nourished in a particular way in the evaluation of the exquisite literature that informs and sustains them. Poetry, in reality, develops in them only in episodic and fragmentary form. The variants of the successive redactions indicate in their overall movement and in their dense ramification the assiduous and restless attempt at poetry, through a whole laborious and tormented maceration of literature, on the part of the author. They also bear witness to the modification of a stylistic and ethical taste, to the action exercised upon the Rime by a twofold moralistic and literary stimulus, by a twofold search, for content-related spiritualization and for formal refinement. T. attempts, on the lexical foundation of Petrarchan origin, distilled and chosen, a language which, with its melodious musicality and rich metaphorical sense, with its labored ingeniousness and refined rhetoric, may translate his world of indefinite emotional perplexity, of sighing and insubstantial experiences that fleetingly graze the surface of the soul and touch the tips of the senses and make them vidire. The lyrical moments in which a more persuasive synthesis of humanity and style is achieved are those in which, through a language poised between painting and music, there are evoked the opalescences of moonlit nights and the trembling enchantments of dawns, disturbing darknesses and luminous fullnesses, and the most capricious shadings of the landscape and the aspects of nature most varied in forms and colors, but above all those feminine images that tend to resolve themselves into profiles of fresh nature (while nature in turn seems to assume feminine characters and movements). This delicacy of tone generally falls away in the passage from love lyric to encomiastic lyric. The expressive tones change as intentions and literary models change. Yet, just as it is not always possible, on a line of development that we may call vertical, to distinguish rigidly the variation over time, from youth to the last years, of the new interventions of feeling and taste, so it is not possible, on a horizontal plane, to fix absolute distinctions among the various parts, from amorous to encomiastic to religious lyric. All the more so if one considers that encomium, for Tasso, is something more than a fashion imposed by contemporary society or by a literary suggestion. Encomium is a category of his spirit, an essential form of his sensibility. Thus even love lyric tends, one might say, toward encomium, just as religious lyric tends toward it. The poetry of the « Encomi » is composed in solemn tableaux, decorated with illustrious names, adorned with a regal array of scepters and crowns, embellished with motifs of a pompous mythology, harmonized in a majestic language, in keeping with Tasso's vision of life (the least democratic poet in our literary history), open onto sumptuous perspectives of courtly settings, crowded with princes and gentlemen, and ignorant of the humbler classes and the more modest settings. Moreover, to the structure of encomiastic poetry Tasso entrusts the deepest accents of his soul: the sentiment of death, of the fleetingness of time, of the nullity of the space in which men act with their passions, of sorrow (felt, this, not so much as a fact of the soul, resolved into a wholly interior vicissitude, as rather as a regret projected onto determinate external realities, strongly highlighted and dripping with tears). On the contrary, sacred lyric does not seem to engage Tasso's soul deeply. His religious emotivity, documented by the lyrics, oscillates between a luxurious ornamentation, which bears the mark of the modes and schemas of contemporary iconography and liturgy, and a sorrowful awareness, of an ethical rather than properly mystical and ascetic nature, folded back upon the weary disquietudes of his spirit, upon his fears of sin and death, upon the consciousness of the vain forms that pass and vanish.
In the same way the Monte Oliveto (to which one could add the seven octaves Della vita di s. Benedetto) develops an ascetic theme, that of flight from the world and cloistral solitude, but this solitude has of the ascetic only the name, the illusory resonance, and not the effective reality, since it not only seems to transform itself, as happened for Petrarch in the De vita solitaria and the De ocio religiosorum, into a humanistic « otium », but even to posit itself as the propitious refuge, hedonistically caressed, of an absolute repose, as the longed-for harbor of a long weariness, in which even books no longer speak to the heart and in which there remains alive only the sweetness of beautiful nature, to which the senses abandon themselves in a last avidity for joy. Thus the two short poems on the Lagrime di Maria Vergine and on the Lagrime di Gesù Cristo touch, without intimate participation and without poetry, the motif of « weeping », suggested on the one hand by the literary tradition that runs from Petrarch to Tansillo, and on the other by the religious tradition that, starting from the Psalms, reaches St. Augustine and down and down to Bellarmine (the latter of whom would again recall in the De gemitu columbae the technical-ascetic necessity of tears).
A far more complex work, however, responding to the demands of a literary and theological culture of broader commitment, is the Mondo creato, published posthumously in 1607. The Hexaemera of St. Basil, of St. Gregory of Nyssa and of St. Ambrose constitute its most important « sources », but very numerous are the resonances and suggestions received from the Bible and from the classics, directly, or else from more recent and contemporary works. At the base of the poem there is an explicit religious intention, the epic celebration of creation. It is not, however, God the creator who is the protagonist that moves the poet's imagination, but rather the created world, as the title symbolically suggests. In effect, in this book the most open poetic fascination derives from the physical spectacle of « created things », contemplated in their infinite range of colors and forms, in their mobile and flowing life. The nature present in these pages is foreign to an idyllic immobility: it is grasped instead in its becoming and in its most unstable aspects, and the very word that portrays it acquires a dynamic value. The only religious suggestion is, in the memory that recomposes the notes of the poem, the echo of melancholy and of death that envelops the brief illusions of life: the theme that is at the center of all Tasso's poetic meditation.
The Gerusalemme Liberata represents the point of convergence of the poet's entire vast activity, the happy culmination of an assiduous elaboration, the maximum realization of an effort aimed at the creation of a masterpiece, an effort that engages and occupies the poet's entire life, from the first attempts of adolescence with the Gerusalemme to the eve of his death, preoccupied with the last efforts surrounding the Conquistata. The material of the first draft is that strictly epic-religious material which clusters around the First Crusade (a theme that was in the air: one need only think, on the plane of cultural history, of the chronicles and histories of the crusades by William of Tyre, by Robert of Monaco, by Benedetto Accolti, printed, reprinted and translated into the vernacular precisely in those decades around the middle of the century; and on the plane of the history of civilization, of the struggles waged by the Catholic world against the Turks; and it is in this historical concreteness, in this attunement with contemporary sensibility, that the truest reason lies for the value that Foscolo recognized in the epic theme of the Gerusalemme when he wrote that « the choice of subject is one of the principal merits of the poem »). In the Liberata this epic-religious material of the Gerusalemme expands, through spontaneous structural amplification and irresistible lyrical impulse, over a vaster and more complex human horizon, whose content nevertheless comes to be organized under the stimulus exerted by the suggestion of a determinate civilization and a precise culture, those of the court and the academy. The Liberata is in effect, before being a testimony of authentic poetry, the eloquent document of a widespread courtier's and academician's affability. From the will to celebrate the world of the court and the academy is born the entire structure on which the poem rests. This vast structural zone establishes itself initially in the simple action of choosing precise figurative contents, which sometimes remain at a crude state of superficial versification; while at other times they take shape (and this is a second ideal expressive moment) on the basis of that taste for rule and technique which is among the major characteristics of this civilization, and which confers on Tasso's language an ordered rhythm of clarifying intelligence. But the structure reaches its maximum degree of elaboration where the court and the academy act by developing a marked choreographic sense of spectacle and decorum. Now the structure of the poem fuses with the lyric precisely along this line of aesthetic emotions, of celebrations of beautiful appearances and spectacular realities, of elegant profiles and sumptuous perspectives, where on the one hand the sense of a civilization is summed up and where on the other a illusion of life and a human aspiration faintly surface, that most intimate, dreamy and evasive aspiration of T. And it is the intervention of a faint and sorrowful note, which, sudden and unexpected, spreads over these images of life, that grants the possibility of a poetic landing in T.'s expression. In the elegiac music that comments on a fleeting dream of life at the very point when it vanishes, Tasso's poetry is realized. T.'s poetry, in reality, must not be sought in a determinate dominant feeling, or in a list of fundamental feelings, but rather in a sentimental rhythm and an interior atmosphere: the rhythm of the perennial illusion and disillusionment of life, the atmosphere of the restless solitude of the soul absorbed in a dream and immediately disappointed by its vanishing. All the characters and countries and situations of the poem find, in the sentimental condition suggested by this critical proposal, the unitary and propitious visual angle for the understanding of the poetry that touches and exalts them. The validity of this interpretation appears easily in the great love stories, which represent the most notable poetic nuclei of the Liberata, that of Tancredi and Clorinda, of Erminia and Tancredi, of Armida and Rinaldo, of Olindo and Sofronia: all set upon a sense of fatal incommunicability, of sorrowful separations, of nostalgic distances, and all resolved in a pathetic chiaroscuro of luminous desires and mournful disenchantments. In this spiritual climate the figure of Goffredo is also sustained, the poetry of his absorbed mystical solitude and of his lonely destiny as a leader. And even the epic of Argante and Solimano is not that of war, but that more intimate and tragic one of their solitude: a solitude, be it well noted, not generic, which cannot be confused with a vague and romantic melancholy (as some interpreter has understood it), but which receives its full meaning, its cosmic resonance, from that essential rhythm of images of life that perpetually are born and die which constitutes the dynamic center of Tasso's human and stylistic intuition. And, as the creatures of the Gerusalemme and its situations, so too its backgrounds and its poetic skies always refer back to that fundamental motif, to that eternal flowing of illusions and disillusions, to that incessant fluctuating of beautiful forms that dawn and immediately set, in which consists the authentic nucleus of T.T.'s lyrical gnoseology. They are solitary landscapes, of nocturnal shadows, of deserted ruins, of boundless sands, of unknown oceanic immensities, of desolate and stagnant drought, of stormy rain: always unsettling aspects of the landscape, which plunge man into a mute anguish, leave him alone, without possibility of refuge in nature, and recall him to thoughts of sadness and to symbols of transience. An atmosphere, this, sometimes aroused by imperceptible touches, scattered in barely perceptible hints and suggestions, in single words and isolated cadences; in minimal quantities, in distant resonances and echoes and yet capable, thus lost, of giving life to the poetry of the Gerusalemme; a poetry that in the end seems to leave in the memory something like a vague religious suggestion: illusions and disillusions always, because the truth of this life is the other life.
Very complex is the passage from the Liberata to the Conquistata, given the vanity and variety of the results. The twenty cantos of the Liberata become meanwhile twenty-four; some portions of the « fable » are modified, amplified or suppressed under the urgency of preoccupations of an ethical and poetic nature; but these retouchings, rather than springing from a new vast lyrical nucleus, such as to engage the poet's soul profoundly, remain on an extremely episodic and fragmentary plane (the most serious negative variations consist in the suppression of Erminia's pastoral at canto VII and in the elimination of the episode of Olindo and Sofronia at canto II). The fantastic contents, the expressive tones and the language undergo a revision oriented fundamentally toward forms of greater solemnity, as that poetics of « magnificence » theorized in the Discorsi del poema eroico demanded. In general the modes that are too modest and narrative appear raised; and the verses come to be better hammered. Yet the poet loses the sense of muted tones, of the most delicate nuances, of sentimental ineffabilities. To the poetics of magnificence there sometimes accords a stylistic inclination turned toward certain monumental and tenebrous forms, or else cruel and funereal ones. In particular the voices of night, of solitude, of the vanity of earthly illusions find more persuasive and transparent modulations. But these are fragmentary results. The Conquistata is a lofty exercise in style, the indicative document of the modification of a taste, by now decisively set, more than the Rime and the Liberata would have allowed one to suppose (and apart from the Mondo creato, which in this respect is perhaps even more significant) toward the formal schemes and the content preferences of the Baroque. But the poetic reality that is in everyone's memory is still always destined to remain, despite T.'s intentions, that of the Liberata.