Idylls of the King: A Victorian Arthurian Epic of Camelot, Honour, Betrayal, and the Fall of the Round Table - Hardcover

by Alfred Tennyson (Author)

Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King is one of the central poetic retellings of the Arthurian legend in English literature. Drawing on the stories of King Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, Merlin, Elaine, Galahad, and the fall of the Round Table, Tennyson reshapes medieval romance into a Victorian meditation on honour, loyalty, temptation, idealism, and national decline. Written in stately blank verse, the sequence transforms Arthurian myth into a moral and imaginative landscape of great emotional force.

The poem's power lies in its double vision: the splendour of Camelot is always shadowed by human weakness, political fracture, and private betrayal. Tennyson's Arthur is both legendary king and doomed idealist, while Guinevere and Lancelot stand at the centre of a tragedy that is personal, spiritual, and historical. For readers of British poetry, Arthurian literature, Victorian literature, medieval legend, and classic narrative verse, Idylls of the King remains an essential work by one of the most important poets of the nineteenth century.

Author Biography

Alfred, Lord Tennyson was born in 1809 at Somersby, Lincolnshire. Schooled at Louth and by his father, a rector, he began to write early, and at the age of twelve he composed "an epic of 6,000 lines." In 1828 he matriculated at Cambridge--but only after the elder Tennyson had approved his recitation by heart of the odes of Horace. Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, published in 1830, revealed Tennyson's swiftly maturing talent, a talent which was augmented by his friendship with Edward FitzGerald and A.H. Hallam. In 1830, the poet and Hallam volunteered in the army of a Spanish insurgent; and Poems (1833) derived largely from experience gained on the Continent. Hallam's death in the same year gave rise to The Two Voices (1834)--a black period in Tennyson's life. After a lengthy silence he published Poems (1842), earning the admiration of Carlyle and Dickens. The year 1850 witnessed his marriage to Emily Sarah Sellwood and his appointment as poet laureate, succeeding Wordsworth. The gravity with which he took his office was reflected in many poems on state occasions. His later years produced his acknowledged masterpieces: In Memoriam (1850), Maud (1855), Ballads and Other Poems (1880), Locksley Hall Sixty Years After (1886), and scattered sections of what would eventually become his epic, Idylls of the King (1859-1885). In 1892, reading his favorite Shakespeare, Tennyson died at Aldworth and received a public funeral in Westminster Abbey.