Critical Essay | Critical Essay by W. David Shaw

Critical Essay by W. David Shaw

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...
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