4. The Liberation of Jerusalem (Gerusalemme Liberata) by Torquato Tasso Did you know that The Iliad and The Odyssey are not the only epic poems produced in Western civilization? I mean, presumably you could have guessed as much since "epic poem" is a whole genre and Homer was (and is) so widely influential, but from the typical grade school and even university curriculum, you'd never know other epics exist (okay, The Aeneid too). Until you get to grad school that is. Torquato Tasso, a sixteenth century Italian, was a scholar and poet intimately familiar with classical epic and the more recent romance genre (so cleverly mocked by Cervantes in the same time period). The Liberation of Jerusalem is his attempt at the ideal Christian epic, which he lays out in theory in his Discourses , which I highly recommend to anyone interested in the epic genre. Among other things, he suggests that romances are really a sub-genre of epic, that only Christian miracles and not classi...
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