Torquato Tasso, long regarded as the last great poet of the Italian Renaissance, was born in Sorrento, Italy on March 11, 1544. His father, also an epic poet, had political problems and was forced to move frequently; Tasso's mother died mysteriously when he was just twelve years old. Tasso, like most other poets of his time, sought patrons from among the wealthy aristocrats and churchmen that littered the Italian landscape. Tasso started the poem that would become Gerusalemme Liberata when he was sixteen and continued working on the poem until 1593. Most critics agree that all three of his major poems, Rinaldo (1562), Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered) (1581), and Gerusalemme Conquistata, are essentially the same poem with different foci that mirror Tasso's emotional state at the time of each publication.

Rinaldo is an epic romance dealing with a young man in the spring of life. At the time, Tasso was enjoying...