Alongside the love poems which he started writing early on, Tasso’s poetic output through the years included, especially after 1579, elegies, encomiastic poems, and other poems which the poet, requested or otherwise, composed for all kinds of occasions. Sonnets of correspondence for men of letters and friends, poems for marriages and births, and the complex canzone genre for celebrating the election of princes or popes. The sheer duration and extent of this eulogistic poetic practice provide a wide panorama of culture in the second half of the sixteenth century (including Speroni, Varchi, Garzoni and the young Marino), and a detailed geography of the important rulers “targeted” in Tasso’s poems, in Italy and Europe in general, with greater attention in his later years to papal Rome and the various papal families, including the Boncompagni, Peretti and Aldobrandini families. Although these poems are frequently related to fleeting moments, in particular during the early months of Tasso’s confinement when he was intent on seeking support after falling into disgrace, the most ambitions examples contain superlative diction throughout, as in the stanzas dedicated to Sixtus V at the beginning of 1588, or the poems for Clement VIII in January 1592, in both cases celebrating the majesty of Christian Rome as fulfilment of the glory of ancient Rome. The encomium deploys a register of magnificence, serious and composed in tone, which Tasso increasingly used in place of the middle style of his love poems.

Title page of a collection of poems published in Venice in 1581, unauthorized by Tasso