William Morris was in some ways the nineteenth-century equivalent of Martha Stewart, or Oprah Winfrey. He was a respected and successful poet, who was also an architect, artist, printer, and textile designers. His textiles are still used by Liberty of London in their classic range of fabrics and clothing. Morris was acquainted with the pre-Raphaelite movement who felt that art had taken a bit of a downturn and that it should return to a more organic and original state, as it had been before Michelangelo.
Morris attended Oxford University with Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and his friend was hugely influential in Morris' writing of The Defence of Guinevere. The poem focuses on the trial of Queen Guenever who is accused of cheating on her husband, King Arthur. Whilst her affair with Sir Lancelot, King Arthur's most trusted knight, has become as folkloric as Arthur's chivalrous exploits and his finding of Excalibur, the poem casts doubt on the validity of the affair, and looks at the trial as a machination orchestrated by another knight, Sir Gawain, who was jealous of Lancelot and craved his role of right hand man to the king.
The defence that the title refers to is not that given by the poet, another narrator or even a theoretical defence presented to clear Guenevere's name; it refers to the defence of herself that Guenevere vociferously gives. She is the Speaker of the poem, and although there are small opening and closing segments by another, unnamed Speaker, it is Guenevere's words that form the poem itself.
The poem is recognizably a Morris poem because of its uses of description of all of the senses at once. It also uses a great deal of Medieval language, because Morris had a tendency to look back on those times as a sort of golden age of Olde England and wanted to make his poems based in that historical time authentic. This Chaucer-esque language and style is typical of Morris, and can also be seen in a number of the other poems in the collection, most notably in the related King Arthur's Tomb and Sir Galahad, a Christmas Mystery. Many of Morris' poems were love poems, but rather than talk about love, and what it meant to him, he based the greater questions of love, betrayal and loss in historical times, focusing on the romances of Medieval time in order to ponder the nature of love, betrayal and loss.
Morris' most famous work was The Well at the World's End, which was published in 1896 and tells the story of Peter, King of Upmeads, and his four sons. At the time of his death, he was known internationally for both his poetry and his textile design, and has more recently been credited with founding the environmentalist movement in Europe.
