HILARY FRASERQuite often, indeed, single writers embraced different aspects of mediev-
alism in their work. Morris, who was captivated in his youth by Malory
and the romance of chivalry, wrote beautiful poems in archaic language on
medieval subjects that powerfully suggested both the decorative loveliness
and the danger of a Middle Ages that owed much to Keatsian Romanti-
cism. But Morris was a student of Karl Marx as well as of Keats and
Malory, and it was through Marx's dialectical materialism that Morris
came to view the fourteenth century as another transitional period: a time
of relative prosperity for the laboring poor between feudalism and capit-
alism. Even in Morris's own day, his poetry was thought to represent a
medievalism shaped by his own culture and temperament. Pater observed
that Morris's poetry draws on a past age "but must not be confounded with
it." 42
Isobel Armstrong has demonstrated that Morris's first volume of poetry
The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems (1858) presents a Middle
Ages mediated specifically by Ruskin's memorable formulation of the
"Grotesque" in The Stones of Venice. Ruskin defines this mode as a
"tendency to delight in fantastic and ludicrous, as well as in sublime,
images" that is a product of the "Disturbed Imagination" of the Gothic
builder. 43 According to Armstrong, Ruskin's reading of "The Nature of
Gothic" (1853) - which Morris was to describe in his "Preface" to the
Kelmscott Press edition of 1892 as "one of the very few necessary and
inevitable utterances of this century" 44 - provided a framework for
Morris's own poetic exploration of "the modern Grotesque." 45 In parti-
cular, this "modern Grotesque" characterized "the ways in which modern
poetic form and consciousness are materially shaped by the form and
nature of work in nineteenth-century society." In Armstrong's view, the
medieval subject matter and forms deployed by Morris are thus neither "a
simple proxy" nor a "disguise for contemporary conditions." Rather, the
poems "are an attempt to be the form in which modern consciousness
shaped by work and labour sees, experiences and desires, to be what it
imagines and the myths it needs to imagine with." 46 Such a reading enables
us to trace the "fantastic" effects to be found in the dramatic monologue
that titles the volume back to the "Disturbed Imagination" induced by
oppression and disempowerment under industrial capitalism. "The Defence
of Guenevere" is full of extraordinary images of distortion, especially ones
of bodily estrangement, dislocation, and even dismemberment. "See
through my long throat," says Guenevere, "how the words go up / In
ripples to my mouth; how in my hand / The shadow lies like wine within a
cup / Of marvellously colour'd gold" (WM I, 8). An equally weird sense of
physical exhaustion emerges from her description of her first kiss with
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