Bio: Entries: Ottava rima - "Boccaccio is credited with originating the stanza, which was much used by Tasso and Ariosto. " Rodomontade - "So called after the braggart Moorish king Rodomonte in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso." romantic epic - "Such poets as Pulci, Boiardo, and Ariosto produced romantic epics that were like medieval romances in stressing the love element, in their complicated loose structure, in the profusion of characters and episodes, and in freedom of verse form. Yet they were like the Virgilian epic in their use of a formal invocation, statement of theme, set speeches, formal descriptions, use of epic similes, supernatural machinery, and division into books. (..) The form proved generally popular with readers, however, and when Edmund Spenser came to write his ambitious English epic, he modeled his poem largely on the romantic epics of Ariosto (Orlando Furioso, 1516) and Tasso."