Torquato Tasso

Torquato Tasso was born on 11 March 1544 in Italy, into a century that still craved grand narratives of faith and war. In 1581 he published Gerusalemme liberata, a poem that reimagined the Siege of Jerusalem during the First Crusade as high imaginative drama, and it caught fire across the continent. But mental illness shadowed him through his later years. On 25 April 1595, he died in Rome — a few days before Pope Clement VIII was to crown him on the Capitoline Hill as king of poets. His work was translated into language after language, and for the next three hundred years he remained one of th…