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Peter G. Epps“The Recission of the King”Seminar PaperEnglish Religious WritersDr. Kevin GardnerDecember 13, 2006
The Recission of the King:The Disappearance of Arthur’s Story from Arthurian Narrative Verse
 Two related problems confront students of epic who turn to the Arthurian matter,particularly if they seek there an especially English mythology: First, the difficulty with whichany definition of “epic” can be articulated, or at least any definition which doesn’t generalize to“unusually many words” or to “this critic’s idea of exalted work,” so as to include any particularincarnation of the Arthurian legendary; and second, the difficulty with which any of the manyArthur stories can be elected as epic, when the dominant impression of Arthur is undoubtedly acomposite of retellings so interwoven as to deprive any separate tale of its status. Certainly, aspecial place must be recorded to Malory’s reworking of Geoffrey of Monmouth, and medievalscholars have long mined that vein. Poets of the past two centuries, however, have turned to thatsame matter repeatedly; and if one hesitates to claim they were attempting to re-forge epic fromthe bits and pieces of poetry and history which survived their confrontation, the poets themselvesseem to have left markings of such an intention in their works. Tennyson’s embedding of fragments that would later become
 Idylls of the King
in a speculative, dramatic poem entitled
The Epic
, not only hints at but declares such a relation between Arthurian storytelling in verse andthe role of epic in poetry and in culture. William Morris, in his repeated attempts to recaptureNorse and Anglo-Saxon poetics in his narrative and dramatic poems, evinces such a desire (as,indeed, his celebrated remark that “if a chap can’t compose an epic poem while he’s weaving
 
EPPS -- 2tapestry he had better shut up” would pretty clearly indicate).
1
Charles Williams interacts atlength, in his posthumous collaboration with C. S. Lewis published under the heading
 ArthurianTorso
(Williams’ own contribution, a composite from notes and partial MS, being titled
TheFigure of Arthur 
), with both the historical and the poetic backgrounds; and writes two longcollections of obscure, sometimes narrative verse building toward a never-completed Arthuriancycle. Still more recently, John Heath-Stubbs in his
 Artorius
has provided a new recombinationof historical and poetic Arthuriana, complete with Anglo-Saxon alliterative technique and Latin-named literary critics giving Polonius a windy run for his money. An exploration of these works,and their relation to (displacement of) the story of Arthur, may perhaps reveal little about thenature of epic; but it definitely puts on display the ingenuity with which poets have attempted tobreathe upon the coals of a dying flame, though in so doing they have made poetry itself, and notthe subject of any particular poem, the poetic subject: and in so doing have contributed to theun-making of narrative verse, a process whose beginning and end lie far off the horizons of thesemodern works.
2
 
1
My source for this form of the oft-cited remark is the back cover of Morris’s
Selected Poems
, Ed. Peter Faulkner.
2
I began this research, recently augmented by my discovery of Heath-Stubbs’ work, some years ago with the notionthat empirically-bounded prose (in fiction, the historical or autobiographical novel) had replaced the epic, and thatthis reflected a fundamental shift in the idea of authority and narrative “voice” which reflected profounder culturalshifts over the same period—roughly the last three to four hundred years. In one conference paper written two yearsago, I saidBriefly, the unwriteability of the epic stems from the implausibility of a hero’s psyche in terms of modern consciousness. In an era where psychological realism and an individualistic, egalitarianconception of human ability demands that characters draw only on their own experience, but neverbelieve they possess any true, objective superiority, the only distinguishing feature of a hero’spsyche is neurosis. [. . . ] Where no hero can survive, there can be no epic. There may beblockbuster action movies and “buddy flicks,” but there can be no cosmic heroism, no stories inwhich the hero is called forth, given divine power, and sent out to do battle against the greatEnemy of his people, serves successfully despite all obstacles, and returns to the earned admirationof his people. Modern consciousness cannot absorb these elements—to truly believe one is calledand empowered by God would be, according to modern psychology, a complex delusion requiringtherapy and possibly institutionalization.Although I stand by much of this analysis, and believe that such a study would develop the
contributions
of modernity to the problems of epic, I have further concluded from my reading in the interim that the problem of epic—its instability of definition, and its apparent unwriteability in modern culture, among others—are far moreendemic, transcultural, and long-lived than such a study could account for; and, further, that any such elegiac tone as
 
EPPS -- 3
Morris: “The Defence of Guenevere”
With all due deference to Tennyson, who began sooner and continued longer than Morrisin pursuit of Arthurian verse, it is perhaps more useful to begin this survey with Morris. Somechronological justice might be rendered by doing so, in that Morris brought out his majorcollection of Arthuriana,
The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems
, in 1858, a year beforeTennyson’s first edition of 
 Idylls of the King
(Faulkner 8-9). As the title poem of the collection,and perhaps that which has had the most influence (and which certainly strikes most closelyupon the same themes as Tennyson and most critics of Arthurian poetry have found mostinteresting), “The Defence of Guenevere” merits first consideration.In his introduction to Morris’s
Selected Poems
, Peter Faulkner approaches “The Defenceof Guenevere” by attempting to differentiate Morris from his milieu. Of the “particular appeal”Arthuriana held for “the Victorians,” Faulkner suggests thatPerhaps there was some stability in the medieval past which might offer guidance,or at least relaxation, in a bewildering modern world. For Morris, certainly, themedieval period was of compelling interest. But—and here the peculiar power of his imagination shows itself—Morris did not idealize the medieval past; nor didhe use it, in the fashion of the later Tennyson, to read a lesson to hiscontemporaries. He preferred to emphasize its dramatic qualities. (9)Sliding past the patronizing tone Faulkner affects toward “the Victorians,” a term whichthroughout this introduction begs for an explicit “especially Tennyson,” there is a furtherproblem, here. While it is certainly true that Morris explores, as Robert Browning was to domuch more flexibly and extensively, the possibilities of dramatic monologue, it is no less true
is suggested by the “death of the hero/death of epic” motif in such research would be misplaced. Currently, it is myopinion, which does not rise to the level of a publishable argument, that epic is an outgrowth of a unique historicalsituation which can only be alluded to, never repeated, and that attempts to “resuscitate” epic or to “create” epicspervasively misunderstand its historical situation and import. This problem is related to the problem of myth andhistory, or the manner in which the common matter of myth and history become bifurcated into mythology andhistoriography.
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