Notes on Authors:
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Idylls of the King (1859-1885) - was nearly 50 when he started the work which contained distorted [reworked] characters: Merlin, Lady of the Lake, Gawain.

Never grasped the "epic" as a whole; focused on Guinevere as the central character.

-Stephen Humphreys Villiers Gurteen, The Arthurian Epic, New York: GP Putnam's Sons 1895


Born in Somersby, Lincolnshire 1809. Schooled at Louth and by his father, a rector. Wrote an epic of 6000 lines at the age of 12. In 1830 he volunteered in the army of a Spanish insurgent. Appointed poet laureate, succeeding Wordsworth. His works include the following:

Poems 1833
The Two Voices 1834
Poems 1842
In Memoriam 1850
Maud 1855
Ballads and Other Poems 1880
Locksley Hall Sixty Years After 1886
Idylls of the King 1859-1885
He died at Aldworth in 1892 while reading Shakespeare and had a public funeral in Westminster Abbey.

-Tennyson bio prefacing Idylls of the King, New American Library of World Literature Inc., 1961

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