Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses and The Lady of Shallott

Alfred, Lord Tennyson is the greatest poet of the Victorian Era. It was an age of astonishing progress in Britain. The global empire brought about by the combination of Industrial Revolution, the might of the British navy, and the commitment to human liberty and the rule of law brought an unexpected golden age upon the country.
But this blessing of power came with a burden. The British had never been a great power in Europe. There was no memory within its people of how to act with their new-found power and responsibility. A public-minded Stoicism akin to that in the Roman Empire, the famous 'stiff-upper lip', was one response, but from its own history, the appeal of the mythic King Arthur and Camelot was more appealing.
In his poetry, Tennyson seemed to intuit that the age of progress and dominion had come at the cost of something essential to its virtuous exercise, the stories that bound its people together. These two poems, one appealing to the figure of an aged Odysseus and the other to that same Camelot express an awareness that progress was threatening to leave virtue behind.
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