ompared to Tasso's "Gierusalemme Liberata," in which
the imperfectly classical manner of the Renaissance is applied to a
Gothic subject, the history of the Crusades. The first specimen given
was the "Morte d'Arthur" of 1842, set in a framework entitled "The Epic,"
in which "the poet, Everard Hall," reads to his friends a fragment from
his epic, "King Arthur," in twelve books. All the rest he has burned.
For--

"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."

The "fragment" is thus put forward tentatively and with
apologies--apologies which were little needed; for the "Morte d'Arthur,"
afterwards embedded in "The Passing of Arthur," remains probably the
best, and certainly the most Homeric passage in the "Idylls." Tennyson's
own quality was more Vergilian than Homeric, but the models which he here
remodels were the Homeric epics. He chose for his measure not the
Spenserian stanza, nor the _ottava rima_ of Tasso, nor the octosyllables
of Scott and the chivalry romances, but the heroic blank verse which
Milton had fixed as the vehicle of English classical epic. He adopts
Homer's narrative practices: the formulated repetitions of phrase, the
pictorial comparisons, the conventional epithets (in moderation), and his
gnomic habit--

"O purblind race of miserable men," etc.

The original four idylls were published in 1859.[29] Thenceforth the
series grew by successive additions and rearrangements up to the
completed "Idylls" of 1888, twelve in number--besides prologue and
epilogue--according to the plan foreshadowed in "The Epic." The story of
Arthur had thus occupied Tennyson for over a half century. Though
modestly entitled "Idylls," by reason of the episodic treatment, the poem
when finished was, in fact, an epic; but an epic that lacked the formal
unity of the "Aeneid" and the "Paradise Lost," or even of the "Iliad." It
resembled the Homeric heroic poems more than the literary epics of Vergil
and Milton, in being not the result of a single act of construction, but
a growth from the gradual fitting together of materials selected from a
vast body of legend. This legendary matter he reduced to an epic unity.
The adventures in Malory's romance are of very uneven value, and it
abounds in inconsistencies and repetitions. He also redistributed the
ethical