In an overview of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, the critic confronts a paradox. Here is the poet’s supreme achievement, the work that occupied more than sixty years of his life, that still remained incomplete at the time of his death, and that, like Camelot itself, has to remain incomplete. But this fact contrasts markedly with the assessment by British critics.

Harold Nicolson opened the dispute about the Idylls of the King in his 1923 study of Tennyson. Although we can forgive Nicolson for much in his brilliant but prejudiced account of Tennyson’s career (Tennyson: Aspects of his Life, Character, and Poetry), it is hard to forgive him his supreme dislike of the Arthurian poem: “With 1857 we come to the third, the unfortunate mid- Victorian, phase of Tennyson’s development, and we enter upon the series of the Idylls, the Enoch Arden poems of 1864, The Holy Grail of 1870, and the inal Idylls of 1872. Already, however, by the end of this period there are indications that the advent of Swinburne was leading the Laureate to consider whether a little - a very little - wine might not with advantage be added to the limpid waters of Camelot” (229-30). He branded the Idylls of the King intellectually insincere (231) while admitting that Tennyson considered the poem the crown- ing masterpiece of his literary achievement.

Nicolson’s attitude has persisted in England down to the present day. Christopher Ricks’s Tennyson (1972) dismisses the Idylls of the King as inferior art, and his book asserts its influence on subsequent British readings of the poem, including Elaine Jordan’s Alfred Tennyson (1988) and Marion Shaw’s Alfred Lord Tennyson (1988).

Sir Charles Tennyson, the poet’s grandson and perhaps the sanest British critic of the poet, acknowledges his own bias against the Idylls of the King as a consequence of his education and the prevalent acceptance of Nicolson’s outlook. He calmly argues that the inal evaluation of Tennyson’s achievement as a major poet can begin only when there is, at long last, a valid assessment of the Idylls of the King.

The study of the Idylls of the King is comparatively recent and centered almost wholly on the American side of the Atlantic. Jerome H. Buckley’s Tennyson: The Growth of a Poet (1960) argues that the poet’s career is indeed a career; in fact, Buckley shows that Tennyson’s life was a growth in poetic sensibility and sensitivity.