The Last Echo: Idylls of the King

Abstract

Tennyson had shown one aspect of his early interest in Arthurian legends when, not long after Arthur Hallam himself had died, he wrote the ‘Morte d’Arthur’. The ‘Morte d’Arthur’ was published in Tennyson’s 1842 Poems, within a framing poem entitled ‘The Epic’ that related it to the contemporary world. But it was across twenty-six of the last thirty-three years of his life that Tennyson turned his full attention to treating Arthurian material. Idylls of the King came out in instalments from 1859 to 1885, with ‘The Passing of Arthur’, a reworked version of the ‘Morte d’Arthur’, constituting the final poem of the cycle.