Idylls of the King Alfred, Lord Tennyson - W. David Shaw (essay date 1967)
W. David Shaw (essay date 1967)
SOURCE: "The Idealist's Dilemma in Idylls of the King," in Victorian Poetry, Vol. V, No. 1, Spring, 1967, pp. 41-53.
[In the essay that follows, Shaw discusses the ramifications of the idealist metaphysics that Tennyson outlines in the Idylls.]
Idylls of the King is one of Tennyson's most extensive and illuminating treatments of a problem that had long preoccupied him in poems like "The Two Voices," "The Ancient Sage," and parts of In Memoriam: how is the idealist to act on the basis of a priori categories that have only an accidental relation to external process? How is he to be fulfilled in his own loneliness in the midst of a hostile phenomenal world? Whereas the skeptic in "The Ancient Sage" or the voice of despair in In Memoriam or "The Two Voices" has a sense of the "real" but no ideals, the visionary has a sense of the ideal but is "mad." The...
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