Journal Article

Tasso and Neoplatonism: The Growth of his Epic Theory

Patterson, Annabel M.

1971

Overview

A good deal has been said, and much of it negative, about the influence of Neoplatonism on the work of Torquato Tasso. Tasso's early biographer Serassi believed that it was at best a juvenile interest which gave place to a mature Aristotelianism, and this view survived into the early-twentieth-century study by Donadoni, along with the accusation that Tasso managed to platonize ‘senza sentire la forza del pensiero platonico’. More recently, B. T. Sozzi reexamined Tasso's Dialogues and works of literary criticism, and came to the conclusion that Tasso's interest in Neoplatonism was neither superficial nor transient, and became if anything more explicit in the later works; for Sozzi, however, Tasso's Neoplatonism is primarily a matter of temperament, a ‘segreta predilezione’ for the magical and the mystical, which has to fight for survival with the more rigorous structures of Aristotelian critical principles.

• Publisher: The Renaissance Society of America,Renaissance Society of America, etc.,c1954-1974,Cambridge University Press
• Subject: Aristotelianism / Art objects / Epics / Heroism / Intellect / Literary criticism / Literary dialogue / Narrative poetry / Neoplatonism / Oratory / Poetry / Tasso, Torquato (1544-1595)