Idylls of the King

About

Tennyson's Idylls of the King (published 1859-1885) is the Victorian period's great Arthurian epic: twelve linked poems narrating the rise and fall of Arthur's Round Table, from the king's wedding to the last battle and his departure to Avalon. Tennyson worked on it for fifty years, and the cumulative structure — each idyll a self-contained story — allows excerpts to work independently. Guinevere and The Passing of Arthur are the most frequently performed. The poem's polished blank verse and its meditation on the impossibility of maintaining an ideal make it one of the great elegiac works in English.