THE EPIC AND MORTE D'ARTHUR

First published, with the epilogue as here printed, in 1842. The _Morte
d'Arthur_ was subsequently taken out of the present setting, and with
substantial expansion appeared as the final poem of the _Idylls of the
King_, with the new title, _The Passing of Arthur_.

Walter Savage Landor doubtless refers to the _Morte d'Arthur_ as early as
1837, when writing to a friend, as follows:--"Yesterday a Mr. Moreton, a
young man of rare judgment, read to me a manuscript by Mr. Tennyson,
being different in style from his printed poems. The subject is the
Death of Arthur. It is more Homeric than any poem of our time, and
rivals some of the noblest parts of the Odyssea." A still earlier
composition is assured by the correspondence of Edward Fitzgerald who
writes that, in 1835, while staying at the Speddings in the Lake Country,
he met Tennyson and heard the poet read the _Morte d'Arthur_ and other
poems of the 1842 volume. They were read out of a MS., "in a little red
book to him and Spedding of a night 'when all the house was mute.'"

In _The Epic_ we have specific reference to the Homeric influence in
these lines:

"Nay, nay," said Hall,
"Why take the style of those heroic times?
For nature brings not back the Mastodon,
Nor we those times; and why should any man
Remodel models? these twelve books of mine
Were faint Homeric echoes, nothing-worth," . . .

Critics have agreed for the most part in considering the _Morte d'Arthur_