Naming Trees in the Gerusalemme liberata

What is it about?

This article argues that the forest landscape, among other elements of Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, dramatizes the poetic process Tasso idealizes in an earlier treatise. As the source of building material (materia) that symbolizes the subject matter (materia) of the romance, the forests are made instruments of compositional objectives.

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Why is it important?

But several trees stand out from the instrumentalized forest to decry the poem’s violent commitment to theory: a cypress tombstone for the poem’s most exploited character, and felled yew trees (tassi) that name the author’s destructive relationship with the literary profession. So while the forest of the Liberata guarantees the poem’s unity, its single trees memorialize with their names the artistic and personal tolls of a purely instrumental poetics.