|
|
Article: The contemporaneity of The Last Tournament.(Critical essay)
- Article from:
- Victorian Poetry
- Article date:
- March 22, 2009
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2009 West Virginia University Press, University of West Virginia. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
The Idylls of the King [functioned as] a shell to encase the nineteenth century.
--Robert Bernard Martin (1)
The single poems making up the collective Idylls of the King were released over a very long period of time, more than sixty-five years if one counts from a first version of Lancelot and Elaine ("The Lady of Shalott," published in 1832) to the first printed insertion of the line "Ideal manhood closed in real man" in 1899. (2) Most of the separated, and sequentially collected, idylls appeared first in volumes of Tennyson's new verse, but one was published in a periodical: The Last Tournament at the opening of the December 1871 issue of the ...