Arthuriad

The legend of King Arthur has been part of the literary fabric of Western culture since at least the time of the early sixth-century Welsh poet Aneirin-principally through Geoffrey of Monmouth''s early twelfth-century Historia Britainum, the late twelfth-century romances of Chretien de Troyes, Sir Thomas Mallory''s Le Morte d'' Arthur (fifteenth century), Tennyson''s Idylls of the King, and more recently, in America at least, the narrative poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson and Lerner and Loewe''s "Camelot," with its emphasis on the illicit love affair of Lancelot and Guenevere. Indeed, so prominent has the legend of King Arthur been in Western culture that before he turned to the Bible to write Paradise Lost, John Milton is said to have considered the Arthurian legend as the subject of an epic poem about the journey of the English people into Christianity.

Now, in his Arthuriad, award-winning poet Frank Salvidio retells the story of the internecine rivalries that culminated in the tragic end of Arthur''s attempt to found an ideal kingdom based on Christian principles and protected by a brotherhood of Christian warriors-the Knights of the Round Table. The Arthuriad tells the story in a series of dramatic monologues in which all the dramatis personae offer self-revealing recollections of the part each played in the tragedy of Arthur''s failed attempt to establish Christian civilization in a pagan world. What emerges is the story of unrestrained human passions undermining the spiritual aspirations on which Arthur sought to establish his ideal kingdom.