Fiction · 1885
Idylls of the King
Twelve narrative poems tell the rise and fall of King Arthur and the fellowship of the Round Table — his coming to the throne, the loves and betrayals of Lancelot, Guinevere, and Tristram, the knights' quest for the Holy Grail, and the last battle that ends his reign — framed throughout as an allegory of the soul's struggle between its higher ideals and its own weakness.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson composed and revised Idylls of the King across more than three decades, publishing the first four idylls in 1859 and the completed twelve-poem cycle in 1885; drawing chiefly on Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, it became one of the most widely read Victorian retellings of the Arthurian legend and shaped how generations of English-speaking readers have pictured Camelot ever since.
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About the author
1809–1892 · Victorian
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he won the Chancellor's Gold Medal for poetry before leaving without a degree. He succeeded William Wordsworth as Britain's Poet Laureate in 1850, a post he held for the rest of his life, and was among the most popular and widely read poets of the Victorian era, admired by Queen Victoria herself. His works include In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850), a long elegy for his closest friend Arthur Hallam; "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1854); and Idylls of the King, a cycle of narrative poems retelling the Arthurian legends that he composed and revised across three decades. He was raised to the peerage as Baron Tennyson in 1884 and died at his home on the Isle of Wight at eighty-three.
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