Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso
Published 1581 · 130,000 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · Epic Poetry, Renaissance Literature, Chivalric Romance, Historical Fiction
How hard is Jerusalem Delivered to read?
Jerusalem Delivered scores 54 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 70 out of 100
- Tasso's ottava rima runs on elevated epic diction — English translations preserve archaic terms of arms, rank, and religion ('puissant,' 'paynim,' 'champaign,' 'emprise') layered over classical and Biblical allusion. It sits below Moby-Dick's specialized whaling jargon but well above Gatsby's plain elegance, since unfamiliar or obsolete words recur through nearly every canto.
- Sentence structure: 72 out of 100
- The stanza form forces long periodic sentences that suspend their subject across several lines before resolving, thick with inversion and epic apostrophe. It reads closer to Proustian subordination than to a plain narrative epic like Idylls of the King, though the ottava rima's rhyme scheme keeps individual clauses from sprawling as far as Faulkner's.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- Every episode is concrete — a joust, a seduction, a night raid — but the whole poem argues a Counter-Reformation case about reason overcoming passion and duty overcoming desire. Readers hold the literal siege narrative and Tasso's moral argument in view simultaneously, similar to how Brothers Karamazov embeds philosophy in melodrama, though Tasso stays closer to action than debate.
- Information density: 68 out of 100
- Twenty cantos juggle a siege, at least four major love plots, a large named cast on both the Christian and Muslim sides, and constant classical and geographical reference. Tracking the interwoven strands (Rinaldo and Armida, Tancredi and Clorinda, Erminia's flight, the siege engines and councils) demands War and Peace-level cast management rather than a single-thread romance.
- Narrative indirection: 38 out of 100
- An omniscient narrator states events and their moral weight plainly, in the mode of classical epic invocation rather than an unreliable or withholding voice. Indirection instead comes from dramatic irony built into the plot itself — most notably that neither Tancredi nor the reader can see through Clorinda's armor until it is too late.
- Symbolic density: 76 out of 100
- Armida's floating pleasure-garden allegorizes sensual temptation pulling knights from holy duty, and the enchanted forest of Saron stages faith itself as a trial only the pure can pass. This runs close to Moby-Dick's whale-as-everything symbolism, with the siege of Jerusalem doubling as an image of the soul's own embattled city.
- Ironic distance: 42 out of 100
- Tasso writes with Counter-Reformation earnestness — Godfrey's piety and the Christian cause are presented sincerely — but his most vivid, sympathetic writing keeps going to the 'wrong' side: Armida the enchantress and Clorinda the pagan warrior. That tension between official doctrine and evident authorial feeling creates a real if understated gap, above Idylls of the King's sustained sincerity but well short of Lolita's practiced unreliability.
- Resolution withholding: 35 out of 100
- The plot closes decisively — Jerusalem falls, Godfrey prays at the liberated Sepulchre — giving the poem a firmer ending than Idylls of the King's deliberately unresolved 'Passing of Arthur.' What lingers unresolved is emotional rather than plot-level: Armida's fate after Rinaldo leaves her, and Clorinda's death, sit uneasily beside the triumphant close.
- Structural complexity: 50 out of 100
- Twenty cantos interweave a siege narrative with at least four separate romance plots and frequent shifts between the Christian camp, Jerusalem, and Armida's enchanted island, comparable to the multi-strand structure of Idylls of the King. Unlike Tennyson's patchwork composition, Tasso keeps the whole on a single chronological spine, which caps the complexity below more fragmented epics.
How Jerusalem Delivered is regarded
Jerusalem Delivered holds a literary regard score of 70 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.