But the age in which he lived was nothing if not critical and argumentative.

The time had long gone by when Dante's massive cathedral, Boccaccio's pleasure domes, Boiardo's and Ariosto's palaces of enchantment, arose as though unbidden and unreasoned from the maker's brain.

It was now impossible to take a step in poetry or art without a theory; and, what was worse, that theory had to be exposed for dissertation and discussion.

Therefore Tasso, though by genius the most spontaneous of men, commenced the great work of his life with criticism.
Already acclimatized to courts, coteries, academies, formed in the school of disputants and pedants, he propounded his _Ars Poetica_ before establishing it by an example.

This was undoubtedly beginning at the wrong end; he committed himself to principles which he was bound to illustrate by practice.