"mythic Uther's deeply-wounded son" — a note to Tennyson's "The Palace of Art"

George P. Landow, Professor of English and the History of Art, Brown University

"Uther's deeply-wounded son" is King Arthur of legend, whose legend will serve as the center of one of Tennyson's greatest works — The Idylls of the King, his experimental version of an epic. This is one of the earliest, of not the earliest, mention of Arthur, whose story was not very wellknown when Tennyson write "Morte d'Arthur" in 1833-34 in part as a recation to Arthur Henry Hallam's death (the poem was not published until 1842).

In the 1857 illustrated edition of Tennyson poems published by Moxon, Dante Gabriel Rossetti chose these lines as the subject of his second illustration for the poem, the first being Saint Cecily, more commonly known as Saint Cecilia, who appears two quatrains earlier.

Last modified 11 October 2005