Torquato Tasso

Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) was an Italian poet born at Sorrento, the son of the courtier-poet Bernardo Tasso. He studied at Padua and Bologna and from the 1560s served the Este court at Ferrara, where he wrote the pastoral play Aminta (1573) and worked for years on his epic of the First Crusade.

Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered), first published in 1581, tells of the Christian siege of Jerusalem under Godfrey of Bouillon and became one of the most influential epics of the late Renaissance. Tasso suffered long periods of mental distress and confinement in the 1570s and 1580s, and later revised the poem as Gerusalemme conquistata. He died in Rome in 1595. Edward Fairfax's English version appeared in 1600.