Idylls of the King

About the book

Tennyson's twelve linked poems revisit Arthurian figures and episodes, from the establishment of the king's rule to the changing condition of the Round Table. Individual narratives concerning Gareth, Geraint and Enid, Merlin and Vivien, Lancelot and Elaine, and the Holy Grail make different demands on the ideal of chivalry. Love, jealousy, spiritual aspiration, and ambition repeatedly complicate the relation between a knight's outward reputation and inward conduct. The poems' shared world allows one person's failure or misunderstanding to acquire consequences beyond a private encounter. Tennyson's Victorian reworking gives the inherited legends a sustained concern with the fragility of moral and political order. Readers can follow each episode as a drama while also watching the widening distance between a community's founding vision and its lived reality.

• Ideal and reality
• Divided loyalty
• Moral order

Why read it

For a poetic Arthurian cycle that makes the fate of a shared ideal depend on intimate choices and conflicting loyalties.

Twelve linked narrative poems · English text