Torquato Tasso, "King of Poets" – Ep 8

[Music] welcome to classical poets live I'm your host Andrew Benson Brown representing the Society of classical poets I am taking a different track with this episode I am not going to interview anybody nor even rant about the problems of the Contemporary poetry World which are legion but I'm not going to focus on that at least directly in in this episode what I want to do instead going to spend some time talking about one of the greatest books you've never heard of or if you have heard of it you've probably heard of it only in passing and you don't know much about it you may have even heard that this book is a bad book and that book is Jerusalem liberata The Liberation of Jerusalem or Jerusalem delivered is another translation but I like the liberation of Jerusalem the title is just uh it's a little more grandiose this was an epic poem written by tato taso it is about the First Crusade the Christians are the good guys the Muslims are the bad guys and just by me giving that briefest of synopses you can probably guess why you've never heard of it because you're really not allowed to write something like that from the kind of good versus evil Clash of cultures perspective today we are living in a diverse world where there are no bad foreigners and no human being is illegal or so we're told but I'm not just saying that this is one of the greatest books ever because I like the poem which I do but it was actually for a long time objectively considered by pretty much everybody in Europe to be one of the greatest books ever and I want to explore how that is and why that is and who taso was because it was a very interesting person but first i'm just going to start by diving into the poem itself a little bit and reading a few stanas from the opening Kanto now this is the Oxford World Classics Edition I have was translated by Max wicker it is a recentish translation 209 so it's a new translation basically and I think it's the best one that's ever been done because it's in OTA Rema and it Rhymes so you really get the feel and the suppleness of the original and way that was actually never really available to this degree until now there was uh an Elizabethan translation translated by uh this poet Fairfax I've read a lot of that one and I thought that that one was pretty good but this one is the best and I'm going to let you get a feel for this poem by just reading the first two stanzas here I sing of War of holy war and him Captain who freed the Seiler of Christ greatly he wrought by force of mind and limb and greatly suffered nobly sacrificed vainly did hell oppose him Asia Grim vainly combined with Libya hell enticed Heaven favored him and guided back to fight under his sacred flag each errant night oh Muse not you who upon Helicon Garland your brow with long since faded Bays but you who among Heavenly choirs Dawn your golden crown of deathless stars always breathe in my breast Celestial fire shed on my song your light and pardon if my lays embroidering the truth seem overgrown at times with Pleasures other than your own so there's a number of things going on here just starting with the second stanza rather than the first uh it's interesting how taso appropriates the Muse he does not reference the classical Muses of Greece who upon Helicon Garland their brows with long since faded Bays instead his Muse is a Christian Muse uh you who among Heavenly choirs Dawn your Golden Crown of deathless stars always this seems you know just kind of like a small thing but it's actually a very significant innovation in Epic in this respect because prior to this The Muse always referred to the pagan gods not to Christianity and if we move to the first stand of the first two lines I sing of War of holy war and himm Captain who freed the seor of Christ the first line refers to of course Virgil anad which is typical of almost every great epic uh but it also refers to arosto or Lando Furioso who arosto himself riffed on Virgil but the way he did it was the note in the back describes it a mischievous elaboration ladies Knights arms loves courtesies and bold Deeds I sing and then the the captain who freed the Seer of Christ in the second line refers to the hero of the poem who is Godfrey of bulah the most popular leader of the First Crusade and The Man Who is credited with capturing Jerusalem in 1099 and who is made the first ruler of that conquered City actually although he died a year later he didn't rule for very long now I'm going to jump ahead a little bit and read a few more stanzas that pertain to this character said God unto his messenger go find Godfrey and ask him in my name what need for more delay why is the fight declined by which enslaved Jerusalem shall be freed let him call his Chiefs to counsel and remind the truants of their task for he shall lead I elect him here on Earth through their election they once his peers shall fight by his Direction he spoke and eagerly did Gabriel speed to perform his bidding and an heir render Ed his viewless Spirit palpable with Mortal Limbs and shape of an age somewhere between Boyhood and youth such human shell but charged with awe and Splendor everywhere he made his own and fixed upon his Maze of golden curls a nimbus of white Rays White Wings he dawned with tips of gold whose climb is indefatigably Swift and sure with which through winds and clouds he soared Sublime above round Earths and oceans curvature so garbed down from eternity to time from purest regions to a world impure he swept and first upon Mount Lebanon paused balanced on extended Wings then on toward Toro's Coast he veered in Flight precipitously down upon his Embassy just then the sun was Rising into sight the face of dawn still half hid in the sea while offering up his customary right Godfrey was praying to the deity when by a second son the light increased and the Angel Rose before him from the East saying to him Godfrey behold the day of battle is at hand the seasons mend why then this interval wherefore delay to free captive Jerusalem go send for all your Chiefs and Council and invade the liards to remember the great end you hereby God ordains their leader and freely they shall submit when you command so if you noticed um we very quickly move beyond the mere historical account and we go to heaven and we see Gabriel delivering the message of this Divine Mission from the almighty to Godfrey of bong now it has to be said if you didn't already guess this the poem is not very historically accurate um although in tasso's defense he was drawing on medieval Chronicles to write this thing especially the account of a William of Ty a 12th century chronicler they just weren't the most accurate accounts so a historical fiction writer is really only as good as his sources but beyond this I would say that if you're really that concerned about accuracy uh you might be one of those snobs who only reads non-fiction books and you probably know the type if you want to be factually accurate just don't write historical fiction because you need to embellish things to make them entertaining uh my own view is that a good work of historical fiction should have a 6040 ratio that is it's more than half accurate maybe around 2/3 accurate but when you go beyond that 80% accurate you're really straining into the territory of the thing that you're writing about is just becoming incredibly boring so taso like all great poets was not concerned with recording just mere historical facts although he was concerned with that and did that to the best of his degree really more importantly taso had a vision and he alludes to this in the beginning of this poem uh at the end of the second stanza that I read he invokes a muse he writes about embroidering the truth and and then in the third stanza he continues that line of thought you know how where Paratus most propers its flattering sweets the world flocks in Delight yet how by charming and malifu verse truth has disposed the most depraved to write as sometimes to a feverish child the nurse holds out a glass with sugared Rim her slight tricks him to drain the bitter draft so stealth restores him and delusion gives him health so we see here that the theme of this St is pleasure flattering sweet delight Charming malous verse and we end with the metaphor of the nurse sugar in the rim of the cup so the child can swallow the bitter medicine so stealth restores him and delusion gives him health so we see that part of artistic license is in fact deception or as Dante memorably put it several centuries before taso the poet tells beautiful lies and so what are some of these beautiful lies in regards to tasso's poem well uh the most glaring is about the hero Godfrey ofula himself taso paints him as being very wise in chalri and Noble but in real life he actually employed treachery to take Jerusalem he did some you know devious things which tasso describes not at all in the poem he was heavily idealized now to be fair I think that Godfrey gets a little too much of a bad rap today as many historical European figures do uh there's this tendency of course to project our values onto the past and to just shake our finger at everybody celebrating the First Crusade is of course a big no no today because the Crusades were imperialistic and aggressive and about Conquest now the obvious response to this which you're not allowed to say is that the Muslims had been invading Europe for centuries before the Crusades and would continue Contin to invade Europe for centuries after and they only failed because of leaders like Charles The Hammer Martell and John hunat the Battle of Tours and the siege of belgrad were more than 700 years apart and even after belgrad for centuries the ottoman Turks continued to invade but the Crusades the one time where the Europeans fought back and the Knights took the fight to the enemy's Homeland now tasso's portrayal of Godfrey himself was very much it should be said the standard view of the time from the time of Godfrey's death in 1100 to really just about 100 years ago Godfrey was idealized to a very high degree he was one of the nine worthies you know this Elite Pantheon of chalc Heroes which was really a big deal because among the nine worthies were also Julius Caesar Alexander Hector King David King Arthur Charlamagne so very illustrious company that Godfrey keeps there and most of the nine worthies are still household names unlike Godfrey who along with tasso has been kind of forgot Forten in fact you could ask the question has taso been forgotten because Godfrey has been forgotten because the historical events taso wrote about have come disrepute well yes partly but it's also the case that the greatness and the fame of taso's poem was a huge boost to Godfrey's postumus status as well and the taso status would have declined really no matter what the subject was and we can say this because the same thing has basically happened to all the other Renaissance epics ludovico arosto and edman Spencer have also pretty much been tossed aside and so has camoo he uh camoo was a Portuguese poet who wrote an epic about Vasco deama the great Explorer and if you had to add a fourth great epic poet to the 16th century Triumph it of taso and arosto and Spencer it would be K and there were a lot more people writing in this genre than just these four epic was the most prestigious genre everybody did it hundreds of works most of them not good were produced uh as will always be the case of course when a lot of people are doing doing the same thing so they've all been forgotten except in their own respective countries and languages in the English-speaking World Spencer is still highly regarded even if I hardly ever meet anybody who's actually read the fairy queen they still give Spencer lip service at least and likewise in Italian and Portuguese these other poets have some status there's quite a bit of multimedia content about taso in the Italian language whether it's on like YouTube or you know audio books but there's really no English language cont that I've been able to find so that's why I really wanted to talk about him because he was so important for such a long time and nobody really ever talks about him today although in fact to this day Sicilian puppet theaters are still performing plays that draw on taso's poem but the poem just doesn't have the same International status that it once did now partly this is because of the strangeness of Renaissance epics they blend classical literature and myth with old French romances and Arthurian Legends that were popular at the time they're Hybrid Works that you don't only see in other places in times although in many ways you could probably see Renaissance epics as the precursors to the modern fantasy novel there's a lot of fantasy folklore the medieval chivalry is mixed in with Supernatural events but the old epics themselves are no longer popular and that is a great shame because they are really really great and very enjoyable reads yaso was basically like the JK rally and or Stephen King of his time he was universally read by educated people universally known in fact the great French writer the counterrevolutionary Romantic Period chatau Brion uh he has this great book he wrote called the Genius of Christianity it is a 700 page Masterpiece that is out of print go figure but during his lifetime this was actually the thing chatau Bon was really known for and then when he died his Memoirs from Beyond the tomb became the thing he was known for after his death but anyway shat Brion has a chapter in this book The Genius of Christianity about epics and about how all the Epic poems to have come along since classical times have been Christian ones chatau Bon thought this was was actually not accidental it was a necessary criteria because epic just isn't possible without some dominant transcendental ethical system to underg what it's about that really provides the sense of universal values that epic needs if it's going to flourish in a culture I think cateau Bon is right about this in this sense the decline of Epic could be taken to be a symptom of a civilization's sickness and Corruption since when epics go out of style it's an indication that a society no longer has any universal value and that it will soon tear itself apart probably as is happening in our own age but the point of this digression is that ChatOn thought that there were only three poems written since Antiquity that deserve to be accorded the title of Epic and those are the Divine Comedy Paradise Lost of course and the liberation of Jerusalem so there you have it The Great chatau Bond pronouncing his authority from Beyond the tomb now the Oxford World Classics Edition of Liberation has an appendix and the notes were done by Mark Davy an Italian Renaissance scholar and Davey compiled a list of all the writers poets artists and composers who adapted some part of the liberation of Jerusalem in their own work um and it's just four pages of names and dates of people who set tasso to music or painted a scene or wrote something now some of these names are recognizable Spencer Milton Byron volte Russo Longfellow monity handle saleri Mozart's rival interesting G now largely most of these names and works have been forgotten though I'm sure they were notable in their day and Mark Davy actually tells us that of all post-medieval authors only Shakespeare's collected works cast a longer Shadow on music and painting So if you were to rank the most influential Western authors of all time in terms of just this metric of influencing future artists composers authors Etc which is probably really the best and most objective measure of that vagant evanescent quality greatness uh here's how it would go this is just verifiable just in terms of citations so we're going by just subjective metrics here not saying who is the best in any kind of subjective sense or who you like so number one Homer no surprise there number two Virgil three Avid four Dante five Shakespeare and sixth taso although maybe those fourth fifth and sixth places could be switched around a little bit Shakespeare you know maybe he'll rank a little higher if you just take all of his Collective Works into consideration maybe even Beyond Dante I don't know you could kind of debate that a little bit but if we're just taking a single work into consideration those fifth and sixth places could probably be reversed now you'll notice a few things here you will notice how the most influential writers in history are without exception all poets not Pros writers if you were to add a seventh and eighth figure to this list it would almost certainly be Milton and probably arosto massively influential for hundreds of years like taso um probably the only Pros work that would be on this top 10 list is Don kyote uh this is not an accident the novel is a very recent development epic was the genre for basically 3,000 years so if you only take one lesson away from this it should be that Pros is for dumb Dums and the number two thing you'll notice is that these figures are all narrative poets not lyric poets although Virgil and Shakespeare also wrote lyric poetry they wouldn't be as important if they'd only done that the great narrative Poets of their time and place all occupy in fact a slightly higher position than their contemporary lyric poets in the pantheon of Latin poetry for example Horus is number three behind Aid and Virgil likewise petrarch takes a backseat to Dante now when I have this conversation with the lyric poets they tend to be very resentful of this and and I'm not saying that it's fair I'm not saying that n narrative poetry is better than lyric poetry or anything um Horus and Petr are still way higher status than most narrative poets who have lived but if there's something this metric does demonstrate it's that if you want average people to care about poetry it must tell a story and poetry today tends not to do that so is it any surprised that people don't really care about poetry anymore now back to the subject Not only was tasso's poem influential his life was as well there were a lot of Art arti s who dramatized taso's biography it was very colorful I haven't said anything really about who taso the man was so here's a brief biography taso's father Bernardo taso was a courtier and a successful poet himself who also wrote an epic romance that was quite successful in his day Bernardo was you know one of these many hundreds of people writing narrative poems that have been forgotten although I guess in the case of bernardo's poem which is called ladik or ladii like probably said that wrong it was supposed to be pretty good so because his father was a poet taso got a head start when he was 16 in 1559 he drafted his first stanas of what would become the liberation of Jerusalem uh the choice of his subject may have been inspired by personal experiences a year earlier Turkish Pirates had raided his family's town of sento and reportedly abducted his sister and brother-in-law so whatever the reason for starting this epic he started it and for more than two decades he labored on it but but he started to get distracted with other problems uh it seems that when he was around 30 years old he began showing symptoms of serious mental illness the jealousies and rivalries of Court life developed into a paranoia he thought he was being poisoned uh compounding this was the fact that certain officials within the Catholic Church didn't like passages of his poems they were considered not doctrinally Orthodox enough and taso began to fear that he would be denounced as a heretic to the Inquisition taso had a difficult relationship with his Patron Alfonso II of the Desta family his paranoia really got on alonso's nerves but he graciously put up with taso because he recognized his talent and because he wanted to be associated with The Prestige of this great epic poem he was writing So eventually taso ended up attacking a servant with a knife he was placed in a mad house this was in 1579 and in the mad house he was able to work on his literary compositions he wasn't confined very strictly a lot of the time if he wasn't having active symptoms so when The Liberation came out in 1581 it took Europe by storm it effects were very far reaching as I have elaborated already and I'm guessing that Fame probably didn't help his mental condition uh you know just thinking of celebrities today who are kind of unhinged by the constant attention they get and when you're already mentally unbalanced to begin with Fame usually doesn't make that condition better on top of that tasso never earned any money for his poem during his enti entire life not a single penny he had no control over the manuscript there were no copyright laws or anything plus he was locked up which didn't help and he remained confined for seven years now the cell where he was kept in St Anna Hospital in Ferrara became a pilgrimage site for literary tourists after his death Guta and Byron both visited it and authored Works about taso inspired by their experience while that original cell no longer exists another one has been erected on the site of it obviously it's not used as a Cell It's a memorial but you can visit it today if you ever find yourself in Ferrara so tasa was leted out eventually he moved to manua then wandered around Italy for another decade then in 1594 Pope Clement VII invited taso to Rome there he would Ascend the capitoline hill and be crowned by the pope now petrarch had been crowned with a laurel wreath on that very same Hill about 250 years earlier which by the way was the occasion where pet P officially announced the Renaissance had begun so you might think well taso pretty nice being crowned on the capitol line hill but petar beat you to it but no you would be wrong to think that tato taso was not scheduled to be crowned any mere poet laurate tato taso was to be crowned with the title king of poets but as it happened only a few days before he was to be crowned taso traveled to a Convent during a storm and died there and since his death no one else has been accorded that title you can probably see why tasso's life has been so frequently dramatized it's not just about who he was it's about what he represented uh tasso became the archetype of the Mad poet the man driven to Insanity by his own genius who sacrificed everything for his art and was oppressed and misunderstood by his Society uh and in this respect taso is to poets what van go is to painters you know people they tell stories about van go now but before that they were telling stories about taso taso was Van go before van go now I really haven't delved it all into the plot of The Liberation of Jerusalem or any of the different characters Beyond Godfrey himself but the story is really great it's beautifully written there's a lot of great couplets that are couched in aphoristic form uh from hateful Day More hateful night is born till yet more hateful Daybreak greets the more and there are also a lot of exciting battle sequences that are very moving within the postclassical literary tradition it is the best Marshall epic that has been written really since the anad and one of my favorite scenes in this respect is in Kanto 9 when the foe of the Christians the sultan solimon raids the Crusader camp at night and catches everyone off guard and he's wreaking havoc and then this happens now from the boldest hearted Left Alive stepped forth latinus born by tiber's side whom neither hardship could have will deprive nor years subdue or tame in strength and pride his five Sons nearly of an age all five wherever he fought were always by his side bearing more arms than years of tender youth their limbs still growing chins and cheeks still smooth so latinas' five Sons surround Solomon and attack him and one by one they fall as their father looks on until he is the last one and he realizes that his Noble Line is now extinct and here's what he does their father ah no father now alas cruel fate to take at once so many sons in their five deaths now sees as in a glass his own and all his Noble lines at once was his old age so strong that in that mass of miseries unbowed by such a fronts he could still breathe still fight but perhaps he his slain Sons deeds and faces did not see and kindly Darkness with her shadowing Hood kept some of that dread vision from his eyes even so unless he too were lost all would seem lost to him a Triumph to despise prodigal of his own for his fo's blood he with the greed of greediest Miser Vis and it is moot that more would mulfy his grief and rage to kill him or to die but thus he taunts his foe seems this my hand so much to be despised so feeble that with all its strength that cannot make you stand to turn on me the fierceness of your hate and Strikes him with a stroke so bitter and so deadly that it tears through maale and plate and finds his side and makes a huge wound there while warm blood spurts and spreads along the tear and at that taunt that blow the Savage Lord turns blade and rage against him straight and muls his curus having smashed his shield that board wowed tight in seven toughen oxhide calls and in his bowels plunges his great sword with a choking SOB wretched latinus Falls and Spills forth in an intermittent Flood now from the wound now from his mouth his blood as on the appenine a sturdy tree that scorns hot Urus and harsh aquilo if a huge wind gust cracks it finally makes nearby trees partake its overthrow so he falls and with such great Fury he makes all who dare come close to him lie low for a man so Fierce a worthy end it is that though he dies he reeks a ruin like this so a very moving scene I think this poem gets a lot of flak for being kind of this you know simple good and evil thing but it is not nearly as simplistic as it is sometimes described as uh some of the heroes are problematic and the Muslim antagonists while they are villains are given touches of humanity by taso in fact one of the most famous and moving p passages of the poem is near the end when the sultan Solomon the one who killed latinus and his five Sons he's looking out on the final battle and he realizes that his army is going to lose and so this is how it's described now while faithful and Infidel forces draw together making wounds and Slaughter rif Fierce Solomon climbs his Tower and in awe beholds though from afar their desperate Strife as on a stage or turnning ground he saw the bitter tragedy of human life horrors of death attack Retreat advance and the great game of Destiny and chance so Solomon puts on his armor and he charges Into The Fray and he is killed at least in the poem in real life that guy lived for another like 8 years but you whatever 6040 ratio so to conclude what are we to make of taso and his poem has it been justly tossed onto the scrap heap of literary history of course you know what I think uh but if you have an opinion about this please do leave a comment I'd like to hear what you have to say but here's my take you know for more than a thousand years the threat of invasion from radical militant Islam was ever present in the mind of every European which is why taso's poem was so relevant for so long and I would argue is still relevant today even though we don't really want to admit that because if we look around we are still being invaded just not in a conventional military capacity yet and if you think that radical Islam is no longer a threat and it's just going to go away I would point out that the prophet Muhammad was a conqueror after all and uh peaceful Sufi Mystics notwithstanding there will always be believers who interpret the Quran as a call to Jihad and of course what do the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan represent if not a modern American Crusade now whatever your stance on that is so I think it is high time that we revive rived taso from his relative obscurity and that we take his lessons to heart and even if Godfrey of Bulan was not exactly the Y Pious idealistic figure that taso portrayed the poet does present us with models of chivalry and piety to Aspire to and above all I think it is time that we revived the title king of poets which has languished in abeyance it's been a vacant position ever since taso was unable to assume it no one has ever been crowned king of poets or queen of poets for that matter and it's high time we found someone worthy to represent classical literature once again a diamond in the rough so to speak to thrust onto the world stage of course this is really an essential part of achieving world poetical domination because we will need a poet to lead us obviously this will not be some measly one-year appointment as with the current Poet Laureate ship it'll be a lifetime position of course a king needs a crown so we're going to need to find a good silver smith to make us one so while you're waiting for my next episode to drop you can accomplish that for me be sure to check out the liberation of Jerusalem one of the top critical comments of Wicker's translation on Amazon is that it's not as good a translation as some pros translation that uh This reviewer cited because it's less literally accurate which you know he's right about that it's less literally accurate but that's total nonsense do not ever let me catch you reading a Pros translation of a work of classical poetry I will not permit it among my subscribers you are an elite group whom I hold to a certain standard reading Pros translations of poetry is far too Bas of a practice you're better than that so don't do it because you'll be cast out into the cold cruel world so that's my advice be on the lookout for the next king or queen of poets who knows where this unsung hero will be they could be working at Walmart right now stocking shelves so while grocery shopping you you may have to peer beyond the uniform to see the true poet within so until next time be formal Stay classy I'll see you then oh