| This study deals with modern poetical works in which Merlin is the central character, as an instance of the larger cultural movement of medievalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The focus is on Edwin Arlington Robinson's epic Merlin and Laurence Binyon's drama The Madness of Merlin. Other works in the genre are discussed for context, and the Vita Merlini ("Life of Merlin"), a medieval Latin epic used by Binyon as a source, is offered in translation and with commentary relevant to the Merlin theme. Tennyson's "Merlin and Vivien" was a background influence on Robinson's epic, as it was on plays by Ralph Adams Cram, Stark Young, Richard Hovey and the young Laurence Binyon, poems by Robert Buchanan and Madison Cawein, and the libretto Ethel Watts Mumford wrote for Henry Hadley's opera Merlin and Vivian. Binyon's The Madness of Merlin follows Celtic tradition, in which Merlin is a Welsh chieftain who becomes insane, which also inspired poems by Mary Porter and Ernest Rhys, dramas by John Veitch and Lambert Wilmer, and the Vita Merlini. Of special interest will be Binyon's integration of Asian artistic conventions into The Madness of Merlin . Orientalist Binyon's writings on Chinese and Japanese painting, and the Buddhist, Daoist and Zhouist (in the sense of the I Ching ) aesthetic ideas behind them, are cited to explain the disjointedness of his drama, which is evident in dialogue, settings and plot. |
