Italian · 1544–1595
Torquato Tasso wrote Jerusalem Delivered (1581), the last great epic of the Italian Renaissance, and then spent seven years locked in a hospital for the insane. The poem takes the First Crusade and Godfrey of Bouillon's siege of Jerusalem as its frame, but its energy runs into the episodes Tasso worried about most: the sorceress Armida seducing the knight Rinaldo into an enchanted garden, and Tancred killing the Saracen warrior Clorinda in single combat without recognizing the woman he loves until he lifts her helmet to baptize her as she dies. Monteverdi, Handel, Gluck, Lully and Rossini all set pieces of it. Tasso was tormented by the fear that the poem was heretical. He submitted it to inquisitors, revised it obsessively, and eventually rewrote the whole thing as the more pious and much less read Jerusalem Conquered. In 1579 the Duke of Ferrara had him confined at the hospital of Sant'Anna, where he stayed until 1586. He died in Rome in 1595, days before he was to be crowned poet laureate on the Capitol.