The "Idylls of the King" is one of the indisputably great long
poems in the English language. Yet Tennyson's doom-laden prophecy
of the fall of the West has been dismissed as a Victorian-Gothic
fairy tale. John D. Rosenberg maintains that no poem of comparable
magnitude has been so misread or so maligned in the twentieth
century as Tennyson's symbolist masterpiece.
In "The Fall of Camelot" the author calls into question the
modernist orthodoxy that rejects all of Victorian poetry as a Waste
Land and ignores the overriding importance of Tennyson to the
development of Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and the symbolists. Far from
being an escapist medieval charade, the "Idylls" offers an
apocalyptic prevision of the nightmare of modern history. Concealed
under the exquisitely romantic surface of the verse is a world of
obsessive sensuality and collapsing values that culminates in the
"last dim weird battle the West." Perhaps the subtlest anatomy of
the failure of ideality in our literature, the "Idylls" is not only
about hazards of mistaking illusion for reality; it dramatically
enacts those dangers, ensnaring the reader in the same delusions
that maim and destroy the characters.
Rosenberg shows that Tennyson has created a new genre whose true
originality criticism has yet to perceive. By employing landscape
as a symbolic extension of character, Tennyson obliterates the gap
between self and scene and frees himself from bondage to
conventional narration.
Throughout the "Idylls" character cannot be extricated from
setting or symbol, and neither has substance apart from the
narrative in which it is enmeshed. In essence, the narrative is a
sequence of symbols protracted in time, the symbolism a kind of
condensed narration.
"Timescape" in the "Idylls," like landscape, serves to bind all
events of the poem into a continuous present. Arthur is at once a
Christ figure and Sun-King whose career parallels that of his
kingdom, waxing and waning with the annual cycle. At the heart of
Arthur's story lies the dual cycle of his passing and promised
return. Incorporating this cycle into its structure, the "Idylls"
is itself a kind of literary second coming of Arthur, a
resurrection in Victorian England of the long sequence of
Arthuriads extending back before Malory and forward through
Spenser, Dryden, Scott, and Tennyson.
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