Malcolm Guite in the Temple of Peace

Poet, priest, and professor Malcolm Guite (rhymes with “kite”) puffs away on a pipe in his study in North Walsham, England, admitting he’s identified with Sir Galahad since a little after the Cuban Missile Crisis. He was 8, and his mother had just begun sharing with him the tales of King Arthur. “I thought that’s what mothers were like,” Guite says. “Little and round and full of poetry.” Mrs. Guite, a Scottish expat who raised her son in Nigeria and England, also knitted him a string coat of mail, painted silver.

It’s to the memory of this little, round mother that Guite dedicates his newest book, Galahad and the Grail (Rabbit Room Press, 372 pp.), a long-form poem about the Round Table knight known for his purity in the quest for the Holy Grail. “Nobody’s done this for 150 years,” Guite says, identifying his USP (publishing-speak for unique selling point). He knew this could also be the book’s unique sinking point. But his hunch paid off. The stunning volume with blockprint-style illustrations from Stephen Crotts topped publishers’ lists and nearly sold out before its April 20 release. Next, readers clamoring for Volume 2, The Coming of Arthur, broke Rabbit Room’s presale records. Arthur hit No. 1 on Amazon’s “New Releases in Poetry” list in June, five months ahead of its November release.

During those post–Missile Crisis years, Guite’s mother told him that she and his father had had to “think twice before bringing you and your sister into such a world as this.” But they held to hope and chose to have children. “And there is hope in this story,” Guite adds. Modern takes on medieval romance tend to look down their noses at Arthurian legend. (Think Don Quixote, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and even Monty Python and the Holy Grail.) Guite’s Galahad moves in precisely the opposite direction, deftly mining and setting forth the legend’s triumphant Christian themes.

Galahad grows up in a castle surrounded by a wasteland he longs to heal—a motif that resonates with Guite’s life. By his teenage years, Guite had developed poetic ambition of his own but lost his faith. He studied ­medieval and Renaissance literature at Cambridge in the ’70s. “I was massively aware of the growing ecological crisis,” Guite says. “So suddenly the wasteland took on another meaning.” He read literary critics claiming the story of the Fisher King arose from a “pre-Christian fertility ritual.” (The Fisher King is a significant figure in Galahad who is wounded but revives, along with his land, when Galahad achieves the Grail.)

When Guite returned to Christianity, he returned fully. He saw in Galahad a profound story of undeserved grace, a vision that comes through crystal-clear in his poem. “The word ‘pre-Christian’ is very problematic,” he says now, “because in the beginning was the Word.” For Guite, the Fisher King feels akin to Adam: “God makes Adam out of the same dust of the ground. And he becomes almost the ground articulate and walking … Adam and the ground are absolutely linked.” If something goes wrong with Adam, something goes wrong with the land. And vice versa.

About 40 years ago, Guite started thinking about crafting an Arthur poem of his own. “I kept putting it off,” he says now. While putting it off, he raised two children, pursued Anglican priesthood, developed his writing chops, and in his 50s finally earned a reputation for poetry. And the Arthuriad? “I feel I’ve left it to the last possible moment.” On the other hand, Guite sees providential wisdom in fame finding him later in life. Now he knows enough to step off a pedestal before he falls off: “I’m too old and knackered to get into trouble now.”

At last, Guite makes a living by his pen—specifically a fountain pen. He works in a wooden, one-room hut with two small tables for books and pipe racks. At the moment, his wall-mounted shelves (made from old wooden wine cases) hold sources he’s consulting for the Arthuriad. A little sloping roof caps the building, and two windowed doors open. “And there’s a beautiful round kind of ceramic disc,” Guite explains, “which my mother had made for me back in the day. She said, ‘This is for your heart, for your temple.’ And it says, ‘The Temple of Peace.’” In front of the hut stands a circular bed of roses, which Guite’s wife of 42 years planted for him, choosing the roses for their names as much as for their beauty: Poet’s Wife, Rambling Rector, Ancient Mariner. (The last nods to Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” another poem Guite’s mother shared with him and about which he has written a book.)

“It’s very important that there’s no electricity in the heart,” Guite says of his writing hut, and adds that it lies just outside the reach of the house’s Wi-Fi signal. Inside the Temple, Guite composes poems on the left page of a journal, saving the right side for later revision. Eventually, he’ll transpose all that work to a computer. Then Guite may return to the journal, editing the piece again in analog.

But the writing doesn’t begin in the Temple. It begins on the walk. Guite takes several walks a day, where a poem “starts on the tongue and in the ear.” Which brings up an interesting question. English epic poets have tended toward blank verse, which mimics the natural rhythm of breathing and walking. Why, in his Arthur work, has this walking poet chosen the ballad form over blank verse?

Two reasons, Guite says. First, blank verse after Milton tends to feel sub-­Miltonic. Second, ballad makes for memorable storytelling. Guite means for Galahad and its successors to be read aloud. “Don’t be spooked by the fact that it’s poetry,” he encourages. Don’t pause portentously at the end of every line. Read it for the sentences.

Could Guite have written his Arthuriad at 40? It’s hard to say. “I’m getting tired and cranky and I have osteoarthritis in my knees,” he says. “But when I’ve really got the wind in my sails, I have to say I could be any age. I feel like the poetry just flows. I’m in the place I was when I was 8.”

One of the hardest parts of writing the Arthuriad, Guite says, is guarding his time so he can get deep enough into the long work. “When hard pressed, I can write a sonnet on the top of a bus or in a hotel lobby,” he says, “but I can’t write an epic in a hotel lobby. It doesn’t work like that.”

“The other thing is actually about confidence,” he adds. “I mean, you read a passage that you’ve written, and think, That was good, I’ll never be as good as that again. So I’m actually experiencing that in spades at the moment.”

Rabbit Room Press plans to publish Guite’s fourth and final Arthuriad volume in the spring of 2028. Guite will be 70.