Angelo Ambrogini derived his humanistic name (often given in English as Politian) from Montepulciano, where he was born into a bourgeois family already connected with the Medici. After the murder of his father in 1464, he moved to Florence, began to study and to write, particularly Latin verse, and eventually won the protection of Lorenzo de' Medici: in 1475 he was appointed tutor to Lorenzo's son Piero and went to live in the Medici household. In this period he associated with the leading scholars and thinkers of Florence (Argyropoulos, Ficino, Landino), but, rather than towards neo-Platonism, his talents were directed to philology and to the writing of poetry in Latin and Italian. In 1475 he began his Stanze per la giostra del Magnifico Giuliano (Verses for the joust of Giuliano the Magnificent), part of which may be connected with Botticelli's paintings, but broke off the poem on the death of Giuliano in the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478, of which he wrote a history on the Sallustian model.

Doubts about the stability of Lorenzo's rule and the hostility of Clarice Orsini, Lorenzo's wife, led him to quit Florence for Mantua in 1479. There, for Francesco Gonzaga, he wrote La favola d'Orfeo, the first pastoral drama in Italian; but in 1480 he returned to Florence to receive from Lorenzo the chair of Greek and Latin eloquence in the studio, which he held until his death, continuing his researches into the more recondite and refined areas of Greek and Latin literature and culture, fruits of which were the erudite Miscellanea, the verse Sylvae (Groves), recited as prolusions to his academic courses, and a body of Greek epigrams that show him to have been the first Italian humanist to have had a real mastery of the language. Not a profound thinker, Poliziano continues to be admired as the greatest textual scholar of his age and as a poet who brought a new delicacy and music to the Italian lyric, blending, particularly in the Stanze, classical and vernacular modes with a lightness and sureness of touch characteristic of the best creations of Laurentian Florence.

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