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A review by brynhammond
Idylls of the King by Alfred Tennyson
4.0
As usual, I thought right up there the short story of Balin, who is to blame for his own tragedy ('My violences, my violences!').
Darker than I had expected and gutsier. I think I decided to read this at last after I saw a book on Tennyson's battle poetry. How he wrote 54 battle poems and had a genuine feel for the 'heroic ethos' of ancient fiction to which he was devoted. Fair enough, I thought. Tried a couple of short ones: his Boadicea is as bloody as she came, and I throbbed to 'The Revenge: a Ballad of the Fleet'. I even felt the tribute in his Ode on Wellington.
I think he's a gorgeous poet, on the whole, although I'd make cuts. The guy can write.
Arthur is his hero, and not Lancelot. This isn't the courtly love version, but the version where a self-indulgent love corrupts a heroic kingdom. Arthur's certainly a fighting king against pagans. Give him a pagan, he can let loose without qualms and soar with the sword.
The comedy can be faux-medieval -- I mean you think of those silly films in tights, but perhaps comedy wasn't his forte. I expect tragedy is, and melancholy.
Again, I'll have Balin, ten pages of him, gut-wrenchingly tragic and very darkly done. But I'd say that about Malory's Balin. Which proves to me Tennyson was awake to the old authentic stuff, though he's often condemned for Victorian.
Darker than I had expected and gutsier. I think I decided to read this at last after I saw a book on Tennyson's battle poetry. How he wrote 54 battle poems and had a genuine feel for the 'heroic ethos' of ancient fiction to which he was devoted. Fair enough, I thought. Tried a couple of short ones: his Boadicea is as bloody as she came, and I throbbed to 'The Revenge: a Ballad of the Fleet'. I even felt the tribute in his Ode on Wellington.
I think he's a gorgeous poet, on the whole, although I'd make cuts. The guy can write.
Arthur is his hero, and not Lancelot. This isn't the courtly love version, but the version where a self-indulgent love corrupts a heroic kingdom. Arthur's certainly a fighting king against pagans. Give him a pagan, he can let loose without qualms and soar with the sword.
The comedy can be faux-medieval -- I mean you think of those silly films in tights, but perhaps comedy wasn't his forte. I expect tragedy is, and melancholy.
Again, I'll have Balin, ten pages of him, gut-wrenchingly tragic and very darkly done. But I'd say that about Malory's Balin. Which proves to me Tennyson was awake to the old authentic stuff, though he's often condemned for Victorian.