As an artist he belonged to the old order which was passing, as a Christian to the new order which was emerging.
His position as a courtier, when the Augustan civility of the earlier Medici was being superseded by dynastic absolutism, complicated his difficulties.

While accepting service in the modern spirit of subjection, he dreamed of masters who should be Maecenases, and fondly imagined that poets might still live, like Petrarch, on terms of equality with princes.
We therefore see in Tasso one who obeyed influences to which his real self never wholly or consciously submitted.

He was not so much out of harmony with his age as the incarnation of its still unharmonized contradictions.

The pietism instilled into his mind at Naples; the theories of art imbibed at Padua and Venice; the classical lumber absorbed during his precocious course of academical studies; the hypocritical employment of allegory to render sensuous poetry decorous; the deference to critical opinion and the dictates of literary lawgivers; the reverence for priests and princes interposed between the soul and God: these were principles which Tasso accepted without having properly assimilated and incorporated their substance into his spiritual being.

What the poet in him really was, we perceive when he wrote, to use Dante's words, as Love dictates; or as Plato said, when he submitted to the mania of the Muse; or as Horace counseled, when he indulged his genius.