William Morris: The Defence of Guenevere

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The Arthurian setting permitted Morris to discuss issues of love and sexual desire with a forthrightness uncommon in Victorian literature. Later Morris’s poetry would be embraced by the Imagists; for example, in 1929 when William Butler Yeats met with Ezra Pound he read The Defence of Guenevere “with great wonder.”n Accused of adultery, a crime punishable by death, Queen Guenevere presents her defense in The Defence of Guenevere, a dramatic monologue in which Guenevere admits her guilt as well as discusses the difficulties of moral decisions, illustrating moral choice with the metaphor of colored banners:n “One of these cloths is heaven, and one This was the title poem of William Morris’s most renowned collection, The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems, originally published in 1858.

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