Victorian Idealism and Human Struggles in 'Idylls of the King' Anonymous College

Idylls of the King reflects the nature and dangers of Victorian idealism through an Arthurian lens. Victorian poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson, portrays the unsustainability of extreme Christian values in his twelve narrative poems depicting the rise and fall of King Arthur. Influenced by Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, Tennyson’s work keeps in the medieval tradition of courtly romance and pastoralism. A signifier of Jesus Christ, King Arthur is the ideal man, embodying the qualities a Victorian gentleman should have. Tennyson’s twelve poems centers around him and the knights of the Table Round, symbols of man’s sins. One sin committed by Lancelot, a Round Table knight, is enough to make the King fall because it ruins his religious wholeness. Religious completeness in relation to the ideal man is heavily explored by Tennyson’s contemporaries, such as the Brontes, the Shelleys, and Dickens. Seeing a shift from agriculture to industry and relatively from faith to science, many Victorians supported a return to humanism, stressing the importance of human capabilities rather than the divine. Naturalism, or the belief that everything stems from nature and not from the divine, is also a theme Tennyson uses to reinforce idealism and...