In Germany as in England discontent with existing
circumstances led poets and artists to seek inspiration in
their own national mediaeval literature. Arthurian ro-
mance found there a new artistic expression in Wagner's
operas. Wagner took from the old German romances of
Tristan and Parzival the themes for his Tristan and
Isolde and Parsifal, in which the music of orchestra and
voice shaped fresh beauty about the old stories.

Although social conditions in the United States were
very different from those in Europe, the interest in
Arthurian stories was shared by, Americans, who looked
to the Old World for intellectual and artistic leadership.
Malory's romance and the body of fairy tales and bal-
lads were the common literary heritage of England and
America, and American critics, poets, and teachers were
friends and admirers of contemporary British poets.
These old and new sources of Arthurian stories were
pointed out in the note which James Russell Lowell
published with his Vision of Sir Launfal in 1848. After
outlining briefly the story of the Grail, he wrote: "Sir
Galahad was at last successful in finding it, as may be
read in the seventeenth book of the Romance of king
Arthur [ Malory Morte d'Arthur]. Tennyson has
made Sir Galahad the subject of one of the most ex-
quisite of his poems." Lowell's poem, in spite of its
inspiration and theme, was not strictly Arthurian; for
Launfal was a creation of the poet's fancy, with a name
from French romance, and there is no mention of Ar-
thur or any of his knights of the Round Table.

Tennyson's popularity in America increased rapidly
after the publication of the volume of 1842 containing
the Sir Galahad to which Lowell referred. The Idylls of
the King reached an immense public, and at least as
early as the 1890's some of them were being taught in
the public schools--a practice which soon became gen-
eral. Probably no other single means ever built up so
large a group of people familiar with Arthur and the
Round Table as this use in schools, over a long period of
time, of the Idylls and other forms of Arthurian stories.

The humorous treatment of these stories in Mark Twain's
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court,
published in 1889, was characteristic of nineteenth-
century America. Late in the century Richard Hovey
wrote several serious Arthurian plays and masques in
verse, but no poetry on these themes comparable to
English works appeared in this country until 1917. In
this year Edwin Arlington Robinson published his
Merlin; in 1920 there followed his Lancelot, and in 1927
his Tristram. Robinson's poems take for granted a
knowledge of the stories and make no attempt to recre-
ate a mediaeval world. They plunge at once into analy-
sis of character and events treated as timeless and
enduring themes. Writing near the end of the first
World War and in the shadow of the second, Robin-
son's interpretation was that of a man profoundly moved
by the disillusionments and uncertainties of the period,
and he used the fate of Arthur and his Round Table as

a mirror wherein men
May see themselves, and pause. . . .

BELOW: The heraldic arms of Sir Tristan, from The
Names, Arms, and Blazons of the Knights of the Round
Table. French manuscript, about 1500. In the Pierpont
Morgan Library, New York, M16, fol. 29

-9-