The Holy Grail

Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) was one of the greatest English poets of all time, becoming the Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria's reign. Tennyson's early poetry, with its medievalism and powerful visual imagery, was a major influence on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In 1848, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt made a list of “Immortals”, artistic heroes whom they admired, especially from literature, notably including Keats and Tennyson, whose work would form subjects for Pre-Raphaelite's paintings.The Lady of Shalott alone was a subject for Rossetti, Hunt, John William Waterhouse (three versions), and Elizabeth Siddall. The Holy Grail is one of the twelve poems included by Tennison in the collectionIdylls of the King (1885), entirely inspired by the figure of King Arthur and the Breton cycle and based on the fifteenth-century novels by Sir Thomas Malory. This Idyll is told in flashback by Sir Percivale, who had become a monk and died one summer before the account,