Description

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.