The New Student's Reference Work/Tasso, Torquato

Tasso, Torquato (tăs′sō̇, tor-kwä′to), an Italian poet, was born at Sorrento, March 11, 1544. His father, also a poet, lived in exile, and Torquato was brought up by his mother, and went to school to the Jesuits till his tenth year, when he joined his father at Rome. He passed some years in study and in helping his father by copying and correcting, when he left for Padua to study law, where he wrote Rinaldo, his first poem, and, after a course of philosophy at Bologna, returned to become a member of a literary academy established by one of his friends. While at the court of Alphonso II, duke of Ferrara, in 1575, Tasso finished his masterpiece, Jerusalem Delivered, but rashly sent it to a society of scholars, critics and churchmen at Rome, instead of publishing it at once. Their criticisms drove him to madness. He believed he had been denounced to the Inquisition and one evening in 1577 he drew his dagger to stab a servant, whom he fancied to be one of his secret enemies. He was imprisoned, but escaped to his birthplace, where he recovered his reason. Two visits to Ferrara were followed by two returns of madness, after one of which he suffered an imprisonment of seven years, being set free in 1586. In 1595 the excitement of visiting Rome to be crowned a poet — the same honor which had been bestowed on Petrarch — caused an illness from which he died on April 25. See Milman’s Life of Torquato Tasso.