Idylls of the King is the culmination of Tennyson’s lifelong fascination with the Arthurian legend. At an early age, the poet became taken with the story of the king who had united his country and made a perfect society, only to see it fall into ruins because of the illicit affair between his queen and his greatest knight. In several poems written when he was young, Tennyson did what may be called character sketches of Arthurian figures: the Maid of Astolat, Galahad, Guinevere, and Lancelot. Shortly after the untimely death of his friend Arthur Hallam, he composed a long narrative on the death of King Arthur; the poem was incorporated as the last of the twelve idylls that now constitute Idylls of the King.
Idylls of the King was published in parts between 1859 and 1885, so there has always been a question concerning the unity of the work: Should it be read as a consistent whole, considered a nineteenth century epic? Or is it a collection, in the vein of In Memoriam, in which individual poems suggest a thematic whole but are not intended to present a coherent story? Most critics have seen sufficient unity in the assemblage to judge that Tennyson intended his work to be taken as a single long poem, and that he consciously used various epic devices to suggest parallels with works such as Vergil’s the Aeneid (c. 29-19 b.c.e., English translation, 1553). The blank verse line, the epic similes, and other devices of phrasing and description recall John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674), unquestionably the most ambitious epic in English.
From his own writings about the poem, as well as from internal evidence, it is clear that Tennyson intended Idylls of the King to be both a commentary on contemporary society and a kind of allegory about the human spirit warring against the fleshly side of humanity’s nature. Arthur is described in the epilogue of the poem as a perfect Victorian gentleman—with clear parallels to Victoria’s dead husband, Prince Albert, who is celebrated by name in the dedication to Idylls of the King added by Tennyson after the Albert’s death in 1861. Throughout the Arthurian story, the poet celebrates Victorian virtues of fidelity to one’s spouse—a concept not at all in keeping with the medieval concept of courtly love, wherein a knight might be in service to (and on occasion have an illicit affair with) a woman other than his wife. Further, Idylls of the King celebrates the...
(The entire section is 1037 words.)