Editorial project

“All my poetic compositions [...] will leave my hands in three distinct volumes, as I had planned, with an equal number of volumes for my prose. My Gerusalemme should be excluded from these volumes, for it requires no company. In the first volume of poems I would like my love poems to be published, in the second volume my eulogistic and encomiastic poems on princes and illustrious ladies, and in the third, my sacred poems, or eulogies on ecclesiastics” (translated from T. Tasso, Le lettere, edited by C. Guasti, 5 vols, Florence, Le Monnier, 1852-55, vol. V, 52). This is how Tasso expressed, in 1592, his plans to collect the works he had produced over the years as a way of dealing with the numerous unauthorized printings and the re-distribution of his work into a thousand pieces. It is of particular note that his Gerusalemme, - here the Gerusalemme conquistata that emerged from the long process of revision of his earlier epic – was to stand alone, and that his other works were to be arranged according to the established division between prose and verse. As regards his poetry, the three-way split is very clearly his love poems, the encomiastic poems and sacred verse, as already announced in a number of Tasso’s letters, and reflected in the arrangement of his later manuscripts. The prose group proposes a distinct section for his epistolary, which Tasso wanted to place alongside the ambitious prose of his dialogues and discourses, indicating that it should be perceived as an integral part of his work as a writer.