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What Do I Read Next?
(Poetry for Students)
- Edgar Allan Poe's poem "Annabel Lee" deals with the sudden death of a woman the speaker has loved, "many many years ago, in a kingdom by the sea." Poe's poetic music matches Tennyson's. Originally published in 1845, it is available in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, published by Vintage Books in 1995.
- Sir Thomas Malory's version of the legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, titled Le Morte D'Arthur, was published in 1485 by William Caxton and is still one of the most influential sources used today for information about the myth. It is available in an unabridged edition, a reprint of the Caxton original, from Sterling Publications, copyright 2000.
- John Steinbeck, the twentieth-century author who is best known for his realistic novels such as Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, wrote one of the best updated versions of the Arthurian legend in his Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, available from Noonday Press, 1993.
- Tennyson included a poem entitled "Lancelot and Elaine," which stays truer to the traditional legends about the relationship between the Round Table knight and Elaine of Astolat, in his book Idylls of the King, which is all about the legends associated with King Arthur. Portions of the book were published between 1859 and 1885, when the first complete edition appeared.
- Patricia A. McKillip's novel The Tower at Stony Wood, published in 2000 by Berkley/Ace, is based on the story of "The Lady of Shalott." The imagery gives a strong sense of the world that Tennyson discusses in this poem, although much of the story is different.
- Readers can see how a nineteenth-century U.S. writer imagined coping with being among the knights of the Round Table in Mark Twain's satiric novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, his response to reading Malory's version of the legends. Originally published in 1889, this novel is available from Bantam Classics in a 1994 edition.
- Nineteenth-century poet and novelist, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, covers the subject of this poem several times, most notably in her poem "Elaine and Elaine," written in 1885 and published in the 1891 collection Songs of the Silent World, which is still available through some library systems.