Ulysses (poem)
Encyclopedia
"Ulysses" is a poem in blank verse
Blank verse
Blank verse is poetry written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. It has been described as "probably the most common and influential form that English poetry has taken since the sixteenth century" and Paul Fussell has claimed that "about three-quarters of all English poetry is in blank verse."The first...

 by the Victorian
Victorian era
The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...

 poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892), written in 1833 and published in 1842 in Tennyson's well-received second volume of poetry. An oft-quoted poem, it is popularly used to illustrate the dramatic monologue
Dramatic monologue
M. H. Abrams notes the following three features of the dramatic monologue as it applies to poetry:-Types of monologues:One of the most important influences on the development of the dramatic monologue is the Romantic poets...

 form. Ulysses describes, to an unspecified audience, his discontent and restlessness upon returning to his kingdom, Ithaca
Ithaca
Ithaca or Ithaka is an island located in the Ionian Sea, in Greece, with an area of and a little more than three thousand inhabitants. It is also a separate regional unit of the Ionian Islands region, and the only municipality of the regional unit. It lies off the northeast coast of Kefalonia and...

, after his far-ranging travels. Facing old age, Ulysses yearns to explore again, despite his reunion with his wife Penelope
Penelope
In Homer's Odyssey, Penelope is the faithful wife of Odysseus, who keeps her suitors at bay in his long absence and is eventually reunited with him....

 and son Telemachus
Telemachus
Telemachus is a figure in Greek mythology, the son of Odysseus and Penelope, and a central character in Homer's Odyssey. The first four books in particular focus on Telemachus' journeys in search of news about his father, who has been away at war...

.

The character of Ulysses (in Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

, Odysseus
Odysseus
Odysseus or Ulysses was a legendary Greek king of Ithaca and the hero of Homer's epic poem the Odyssey. Odysseus also plays a key role in Homer's Iliad and other works in the Epic Cycle....

) has been explored widely in literature. The adventures of Odysseus were first recorded in Homer's
Homer
In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...

 Iliad
Iliad
The Iliad is an epic poem in dactylic hexameters, traditionally attributed to Homer. Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles...

 and Odyssey
Odyssey
The Odyssey is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, the other work ascribed to Homer. The poem is fundamental to the modern Western canon, and is the second—the Iliad being the first—extant work of Western literature...

 (c. 800–700 BC), and Tennyson draws on Homer's narrative in the poem. Most critics, however, find that Tennyson's Ulysses recalls Dante's
Dante Alighieri
Durante degli Alighieri, mononymously referred to as Dante , was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker. He is best known for the monumental epic poem La commedia, later named La divina commedia ...

 Ulisse in his Inferno (c. 1320). In Dante's re-telling, Ulisse is condemned to hell among the false counsellors, both for his pursuit of knowledge beyond human bounds and for his adventures in disregard of his family.

For much of this poem's history, readers viewed Ulysses as resolute and heroic, admiring him for his determination "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield". The view that Tennyson intended a heroic character is supported by his statements about the poem, and by the events in his life—the death of his closest friend—that prompted him to write it. In the twentieth century, some new interpretations of "Ulysses" highlighted potential ironies
Irony
Irony is a rhetorical device, literary technique, or situation in which there is a sharp incongruity or discordance that goes beyond the simple and evident intention of words or actions...

 in the poem. They argued, for example, that Ulysses wishes to selfishly abandon his kingdom and family, and they questioned more positive assessments of Ulysses' character by demonstrating how he resembles flawed protagonists in earlier literature.

Synopsis and structure

As the poem begins, Ulysses has returned to his kingdom, Ithaca, having had a long, eventful journey home after fighting in the Trojan War
Trojan War
In Greek mythology, the Trojan War was waged against the city of Troy by the Achaeans after Paris of Troy took Helen from her husband Menelaus, the king of Sparta. The war is among the most important events in Greek mythology and was narrated in many works of Greek literature, including the Iliad...

. Confronted again by domestic life, Ulysses expresses his lack of contentment, including his indifference toward the "savage race" (line 4) that he governs. Ulysses contrasts his restlessness and boredom with his heroic past. He contemplates his age and eventual death—"Life piled on life / Were all too little, and of one to me / Little remains" (24–26)—and longs for further experience and knowledge. His son Telemachus will inherit the throne that Ulysses finds burdensome. While Ulysses thinks Telemachus will be an adequate king, he seems to have little empathy for his son—"He works his work, I mine" (43)—and the necessary methods of governing—"by slow prudence" (36) and "through soft degrees" (37). In the final section, Ulysses turns his attention to his mariners and calls on them to join him on another quest, making no guarantees as to their fate but attempting to conjure their heroic past:


… Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. (56–64)

Prosody

The speaker's language is unadorned and forceful, and it expresses Ulysses' conflicting moods as he searches for continuity between his past and future. There is often a marked contrast between the sentiment of Ulysses' words and the sounds that express them. For example, the poem's insistent iambic pentameter
Iambic pentameter
Iambic pentameter is a commonly used metrical line in traditional verse and verse drama. The term describes the particular rhythm that the words establish in that line. That rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables; these small groups of syllables are called "feet"...

 is often interrupted by spondee
Spondee
In poetry, a spondee is a metrical foot consisting of two long syllables, as determined by syllable weight in classical meters, or two stressed syllables, as determined by stress in modern meters...

s (metrical feet consisting of two long syllables), which slow down the movement of the poem; the labouring language casts into doubt the reliability
Unreliable narrator
An unreliable narrator is a narrator, whether in literature, film, or theatre, whose credibility has been seriously compromised. The term was coined in 1961 by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction. This narrative mode is one that can be developed by an author for a number of reasons, usually...

 of Ulysses' sentiments. Noteworthy are lines 19–21:


Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move. (19–21)


Observing their burdensome prosodic effect, the poet Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold was a British poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to both Tom Arnold, literary professor, and William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator...

 remarked, "these three lines by themselves take up nearly as much time as a whole book of the Iliad."
Many of the poem's clauses carry over into the following line; this enjambment
Enjambment
Enjambment or enjambement is the breaking of a syntactic unit by the end of a line or between two verses. It is to be contrasted with end-stopping, where each linguistic unit corresponds with a single line, and caesura, in which the linguistic unit ends mid-line...

 emphasizes Ulysses' restlessness and dissatisfaction.

Form

The poem's seventy lines of blank verse
Blank verse
Blank verse is poetry written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. It has been described as "probably the most common and influential form that English poetry has taken since the sixteenth century" and Paul Fussell has claimed that "about three-quarters of all English poetry is in blank verse."The first...

 are presented as a dramatic monologue
Dramatic monologue
M. H. Abrams notes the following three features of the dramatic monologue as it applies to poetry:-Types of monologues:One of the most important influences on the development of the dramatic monologue is the Romantic poets...

. Scholars disagree on how Ulysses' speech functions in this format; it is not necessarily clear to whom Ulysses is speaking, if anyone, and from what location. Some see the verse turning from a soliloquy
Soliloquy
A soliloquy is a device often used in drama whereby a character relates his or her thoughts and feelings to him/herself and to the audience without addressing any of the other characters, and is delivered often when they are alone or think they are alone. Soliloquy is distinct from monologue and...

 to a public address, as Ulysses seems to speak to himself in the first movement, then to turn to an audience as he introduces his son, and then to relocate to the seashore where he addresses his mariners. In this interpretation, the comparatively direct and honest language of the first movement is set against the more politically minded tone of the last two movements. For example, the second paragraph (33–43) about Telemachus, in which Ulysses muses again about domestic life, is a "revised version [of lines 1–5] for public consumption": a "savage race" is revised to a "rugged people".

The ironic interpretations of "Ulysses" may be the result of the modern tendency to consider the narrator of a dramatic monologue as necessarily "unreliable". According to critic Dwight Culler, the poem has been a victim of revisionist readings in which the reader expects to reconstruct the truth from a misleading narrator's accidental revelations. (Compare the more obvious use of this approach in Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess
My Last Duchess
"My Last Duchess" is a poem by Robert Browning, frequently anthologized as an example of the dramatic monologue. It first appeared in 1842 in Browning's Dramatic Lyrics.-Poem structure and historical background:...

".) Culler himself views "Ulysses" as a dialectic
Dialectic
Dialectic is a method of argument for resolving disagreement that has been central to Indic and European philosophy since antiquity. The word dialectic originated in Ancient Greece, and was made popular by Plato in the Socratic dialogues...

 in which the speaker weighs the virtues of a contemplative and an active approach to life; Ulysses moves through four emotional stages that are self-revelatory, not ironic: beginning with his rejection of the barren life to which he has returned in Ithaca, he then fondly recalls his heroic past, recognizes the validity of Telemachus' method of governing, and with these thoughts plans another journey.

Publication history

Tennyson completed the poem on 20 October 1833, but it was not published until 1842, in his second collection of Poems. Unlike many of Tennyson's other important poems, "Ulysses" was not revised after its publication. Tennyson originally blocked out the poem in four paragraphs; it has, however, been printed with both three and four paragraphs, structures that affect the analysis of Ulysses' narration. With three paragraphs, the poem is divided at lines 33 and 44; with four, the five-line introduction becomes its own movement. In this four-movement version, the first and third are thematically parallel, but may be read as interior and exterior monologue
Monologue
In theatre, a monologue is a speech presented by a single character, most often to express their thoughts aloud, though sometimes also to directly address another character or the audience. Monologues are common across the range of dramatic media...

s, respectively.

Autobiographical elements

Tennyson penned "Ulysses" after the death of his close Cambridge
University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...

 friend, the poet Arthur Henry Hallam (1811–1833), with whom Tennyson had a strong emotional bond. The two friends had spent much time discussing poetry and philosophy, writing verse, and travelling in southern France
Southern France
Southern France , colloquially known as le Midi is defined geographical area consisting of the regions of France that border the Atlantic Ocean south of the Gironde, Spain, the Mediterranean, and Italy...

, the Pyrenees
Pyrenees
The Pyrenees is a range of mountains in southwest Europe that forms a natural border between France and Spain...

, and Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

. Tennyson considered Hallam destined for greatness, perhaps as a statesman.

When Tennyson heard on 1 October 1833 of his friend's death, he was living in Somersby
Somersby, Lincolnshire
Somersby is a village in the parish of Greetham with Somersby in the Lincolnshire Wolds, northwest of Spilsby and eastnortheast of Horncastle. The parish covers about .- History :...

, Lincolnshire
Lincolnshire
Lincolnshire is a county in the east of England. It borders Norfolk to the south east, Cambridgeshire to the south, Rutland to the south west, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire to the west, South Yorkshire to the north west, and the East Riding of Yorkshire to the north. It also borders...

, in cramped quarters with his mother and nine of his ten siblings. His father had died in 1831, requiring Tennyson to return home and take responsibility for the family. Tennyson's friends were becoming increasingly concerned about his mental and physical health during this time. The family had little income, and three of Tennyson's brothers were mentally ill. Just as Tennyson's outlook was improving—he was adjusting to his new domestic duties, regaining contact with friends, and had published his 1832 book of poems—the news of Hallam's death arrived. Tennyson shared his grief with his sister, Emily
Emilia Tennyson
Emilia Tennyson , known simply as Emily within her family, was a younger sister of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and the fiancée of Arthur Henry Hallam, for whom Tennyson's great poem, In Memoriam A.H.H., was written. Tennyson met Hallam through her brother, and they were engaged in 1832. They were never...

, who had been engaged to Hallam.

According to Victorian scholar Linda Hughes, the emotional gulf between the state of his domestic affairs and the loss of his special friendship informs the reading of "Ulysses"—particularly its treatment of domesticity. At one moment, Ulysses' discontent seems to mirror that of Tennyson, who would have been frustrated with managing the house in such a state of grief. At the next, Ulysses is determined to transcend his age and his environment by travelling again. It may be that Ulysses' determination to defy circumstance attracted Tennyson to the myth; he said that the poem "gave my feeling about the need of going forward and braving the struggle of life". On another occasion, the poet stated, "There is more about myself in Ulysses, which was written under the sense of loss and that all had gone by, but that still life must be fought out to the end. It was more written with the feeling of his loss upon me than many poems in In Memoriam." Hallam's death influenced much of Tennyson's poetry, including perhaps his most highly regarded work, In Memoriam A.H.H.
In Memoriam A.H.H.
In Memoriam A.H.H. is a poem by the English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, completed in 1849. It is a requiem for the poet's Cambridge friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage in Vienna in 1833...

, begun in 1833 and completed seventeen years later.

Other critics find stylistic incongruities between the poem and its author that make "Ulysses" exceptional. W. W. Robson writes, "Tennyson, the responsible social being, the admirably serious and 'committed' individual, is uttering strenuous sentiments in the accent of Tennyson the most un-strenuous, lonely and poignant of poets." He finds that Tennyson's two widely noted personae, the "responsible social being" and the melancholic poet, meet uniquely in "Ulysses", yet seem not to recognize each other within the text.

Literary context

Tennyson adopts aspects of the Ulysses character and narrative from many sources; his treatment of Ulysses is the first modern account. The ancient Greek
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...

 poet Homer
Homer
In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...

 introduced Ulysses (Odysseus
Odysseus
Odysseus or Ulysses was a legendary Greek king of Ithaca and the hero of Homer's epic poem the Odyssey. Odysseus also plays a key role in Homer's Iliad and other works in the Epic Cycle....

 in Greek), and many later poets took up the character, including Euripides
Euripides
Euripides was one of the three great tragedians of classical Athens, the other two being Aeschylus and Sophocles. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him but according to the Suda it was ninety-two at most...

, Horace
Horace
Quintus Horatius Flaccus , known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus.-Life:...

, Dante
DANTE
Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe is a not-for-profit organisation that plans, builds and operates the international networks that interconnect the various national research and education networks in Europe and surrounding regions...

, William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...

, and Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope was an 18th-century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. He is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson...

. Homer's Odyssey provides the poem's narrative background: in its eleventh book the prophet Tiresias
Tiresias
In Greek mythology, Tiresias was a blind prophet of Thebes, famous for clairvoyance and for being transformed into a woman for seven years. He was the son of the shepherd Everes and the nymph Chariclo; Tiresias participated fully in seven generations at Thebes, beginning as advisor to Cadmus...

 foretells that Ulysses will return to Ithaca after a difficult voyage, then begin a new, mysterious voyage, and later die a peaceful, "unwarlike" death that comes vaguely "from the sea". At the conclusion of Tennyson's poem, his Ulysses is contemplating undertaking this new voyage.

Tennyson's character, however, is not the lover of public affairs seen in Homer's poems. Rather, "Ulisse" from Dante's
DANTE
Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe is a not-for-profit organisation that plans, builds and operates the international networks that interconnect the various national research and education networks in Europe and surrounding regions...

 Inferno is Tennyson's main source for the character, which has an important effect on the poem's interpretation. Ulisse recalls his voyage in the Infernos 26th canto
Canto
The canto is a principal form of division in a long poem, especially the epic. The word comes from Italian, meaning "song" or singing. Famous examples of epic poetry which employ the canto division are Lord Byron's Don Juan, Valmiki's Ramayana , Dante's The Divine Comedy , and Ezra Pound's The...

, in which he is condemned to the Eighth Circle of false counsellors for misusing his gift of reason. Dante treats Ulisse, with his "zeal …/ T'explore the world", as an evil counsellor who lusts for adventure at the expense of his family and his duties in Ithaca. Tennyson projects this zeal into Ulysses' unquenched desire for knowledge:


And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. (30–32)


The poet's intention to recall the Homeric character remains evident in certain passages. "I am become a name" (11) recalls an episode in the Odyssey in which Demodocus
Demodocus (Homer)
In the Odyssey by Homer, Demodocus is a poet who often visits the court of Alcinous, king of the Phaeacians on the island of Scherie. During Odysseus' stay on Scherie, Demodocus performs three narrative songs....

 sings about Odysseus' adventures in the king's presence, acknowledging his fame. With phrases such as "There gloom the dark broad seas" (45) and "The deep / Moans round with many voices" (55–56), Tennyson seems to be consciously invoking Homer.

Critics have also noted the influence of Shakespeare in two passages. In the early movement, the savage race "That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me" (5) echoes Hamlet's
Prince Hamlet
Prince Hamlet is a fictional character, the protagonist in Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet. He is the Prince of Denmark, nephew to the usurping Claudius and son of the previous King of Denmark, Old Hamlet. Throughout the play he struggles with whether, and how, to avenge the murder of his father, and...

 soliloquy
Soliloquy
A soliloquy is a device often used in drama whereby a character relates his or her thoughts and feelings to him/herself and to the audience without addressing any of the other characters, and is delivered often when they are alone or think they are alone. Soliloquy is distinct from monologue and...

: "What is a man, / If his chief good and market of his time / Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more." Tennyson's "How dull it is to pause, to make an end, / To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!" (22–23) recalls Shakespeare's Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida
Troilus and Cressida
Troilus and Cressida is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1602. It was also described by Frederick S. Boas as one of Shakespeare's problem plays. The play ends on a very bleak note with the death of the noble Trojan Hector and destruction of the love between Troilus...

 (c. 1602):

Perserverance, my dear lord,
Keeps honour bright: to have done is to hang
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail,
In monumental mockery.


The last movement of "Ulysses", which is among the most familiar passages in nineteenth-century English-language poetry, presents decisive evidence of the influence of Dante. Ulysses turns his attention from himself and his kingdom and speaks of ports, seas, and his mariners. The strains of discontent and weakness in old age remain throughout the poem, but Tennyson finally leaves Ulysses "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield" (70), recalling the Dantesque damnable desire for knowledge beyond all bounds. The words of Dante's character as he exhorts his men to the journey find parallel in those of Tennyson's Ulysses, who calls his men to join him on one last voyage. Quoting Dante's Ulisse:


'O brothers', said I, 'who are come despite
Ten thousand perils to the West, let none,
While still our senses hold the vigil slight
Remaining to us ere our course is run,
Be willing to forgo experience
Of the unpeopled world beyond the sun.
Regard your origin,—from whom and whence!
Not to exist like brutes, but made were ye
To follow virtue and intelligence'.


However, critics note that in the Homeric narrative, Ulysses' original mariners are dead. A significant irony therefore develops from Ulysses' speech to his sailors—"Come, my friends, / 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world" (56–57). Since Dante's Ulisse has already undertaken this voyage and recounts it in the Inferno, Ulysses' entire monologue can be envisioned as his recollection while situated in Hell.

From affirmation to irony

The degree to which Tennyson identifies with Ulysses has provided one of the great debates among scholars of the poem. Critics who find that Tennyson identifies with the speaker read Ulysses' speech "affirmatively", or without irony
Irony
Irony is a rhetorical device, literary technique, or situation in which there is a sharp incongruity or discordance that goes beyond the simple and evident intention of words or actions...

. Many other interpretations of the poem have developed from the argument that Tennyson does not identify with Ulysses, and further criticism has suggested that the purported inconsistencies in Ulysses' character are the fault of the poet himself.

Key to the affirmative reading of "Ulysses" is the biographical context of the poem. Such a reading takes into account Tennyson's statements about writing the poem—"the need of going forward"—and considers that he would not undermine Ulysses' determination with irony when he needed a similar stalwartness to face life after Hallam's death. Ulysses is thus seen as an heroic character whose determination to seek "some work of noble note" (52) is courageous in the face of a "still hearth" (2) and old age. The passion and conviction of Tennyson's language—and even his own comments on the poem—signify that the poet, as was typical in the Victorian age, admired courage and persistence. Read straightforwardly, "Ulysses" promotes the questing spirit of youth, even in old age, and a refusal to resign and face life passively.

Until the early twentieth century, readers reacted to "Ulysses" sympathetically. The meaning of the poem was increasingly debated as Tennyson's stature rose. After Paull F. Baum criticized Ulysses' inconsistencies and Tennyson's conception of the poem in 1948, the ironic interpretation became dominant. Baum finds in Ulysses echoes of Lord Byron's flawed heroes
Byronic hero
The Byronic hero is an idealised but flawed character exemplified in the life and writings of English Romantic poet Lord Byron. It was characterised by Lady Caroline Lamb, later a lover of Byron's, as being "mad, bad, and dangerous to know"...

, who similarly display conflicting emotions, self-critical introspection, and a rejection of social responsibility. Even Ulysses' resolute final utterance—"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield"—is undercut by irony, when Baum and later critics compare this line to Satan's
Satan
Satan , "the opposer", is the title of various entities, both human and divine, who challenge the faith of humans in the Hebrew Bible...

 "courage never to submit or yield" in John Milton's
John Milton
John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell...

 Paradise Lost
Paradise Lost
Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton. It was originally published in 1667 in ten books, with a total of over ten thousand individual lines of verse...

 (1667).

Ulysses' apparent disdain for those around him is another facet of the ironic perspective. He declares that he is "matched with an aged wife" (3), indicates his weariness in governing a "savage race" (4), and suggests his philosophical distance from his son Telemachus. A skeptical reading of the second paragraph finds it a condescending tribute to Telemachus and a rejection of his "slow prudence" (36). However, the adjectives used to describe Telemachus—"blameless", "discerning", and "decent"—are words with positive connotations in other of Tennyson's poetry and within the classical tradition, where "blameless" is an attribute of gods and heroes.

Critic E. J. Chiasson argued in 1954 that Ulysses is without faith in an afterlife, and that Tennyson uses a "method of indirection" to affirm the need for religious faith by showing how Ulysses' lack of faith leads to his neglect of kingdom and family. Chiasson regards the poem as "intractable" in Tennyson's canon, but finds that the poem's meaning resolves itself when this indirection is understood: it illustrates Tennyson's conviction that "disregarding religious sanctions and 'submitting all things to desire' leads to either a sybaritic or a brutal repudiation of responsibility and 'life'."

Other ironic readings have found Ulysses longing for withdrawal, even death, in the form of his proposed quest. In noting the sense of passivity in the poem, critics highlight Tennyson's tendency toward the melancholic. T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...

 opines that "Tennyson could not tell a story at all". He finds Dante's treatment of Ulysses exciting, while Tennyson's piece is "an elegiac mood". "Ulysses" is found lacking in narrative action; the hero's goal is vague, and by the poem's famous last line, it is not clear for what he is "striving", or to what he refuses to yield. According to Victorian scholar Herbert Tucker, Tennyson’s characters "move" through time and space to be moved inwardly.
To Ulysses, experience is "somewhere out there",


… an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move. (19–21)

Legacy

Contemporary appraisal

The contemporary reviews of "Ulysses" were positive and found no irony in the poem. Author John Sterling
John Sterling (author)
John Sterling , was a British author.He was born at Kames Castle on the Isle of Bute. He belonged to a family of Scottish origin which had settled in Ireland during the Cromwellian period...

—like Tennyson a member of the Cambridge Apostles
Cambridge Apostles
The Cambridge Apostles, also known as the Cambridge Conversazione Society, is an intellectual secret society at the University of Cambridge founded in 1820 by George Tomlinson, a Cambridge student who went on to become the first Bishop of Gibraltar....

—wrote in the Quarterly Review
Quarterly Review
The Quarterly Review was a literary and political periodical founded in March 1809 by the well known London publishing house John Murray. It ceased publication in 1967.-Early years:...

 in 1842, "How superior is 'Ulysses'! There is in this work a delightful epic tone, and a clear impassioned wisdom quietly carving its sage words and graceful figures on pale but lasting marble." Tennyson's 1842 volume of poetry impressed Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher during the Victorian era.He called economics "the dismal science", wrote articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopedia, and became a controversial social commentator.Coming from a strict Calvinist family, Carlyle was...

. Quoting three lines of "Ulysses" in an 1842 letter to Tennyson—


It may be that the gulfs will wash us down,
It may be we shall touch the happy Isles
And see the great Achilles whom we knew! [sic] (62–64)


—Carlyle remarked, "These lines do not make me weep, but there is in me what would fill whole Lachrymatories as I read." English writer and theologian Richard Holt Hutton
Richard Holt Hutton
Richard Holt Hutton was an English writer and theologian.The son of Joseph Hutton, Unitarian minister, he was born at Leeds. His family moved to London in 1835, and he was educated at University College School and University College, London, where he began a lifelong friendship with Walter...

 summarized the poem as "[Tennyson's] friendly picture of the insatiable craving for new experience, enterprise, and adventure, when under the control of a luminous reason and a self-controlled will." The contemporary poet Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold was a British poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to both Tom Arnold, literary professor, and William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator...

 was early in observing the narrative irony of the poem: he found Ulysses' speech "the least plain, the most un-Homeric, which can possibly be conceived. Homer presents his thought to you just as it wells from the source of his mind: Mr. Tennyson carefully distils his thought before he will part with it. Hence comes … a heightened and elaborate air."

Canonization

"Ulysses" was well-received by critics, yet its rise within the Tennyson canon took decades. Tennyson did not usually select it for publication in poetry anthologies; in teaching anthologies, however, the poem was usually included—and it remains a popular teaching poem today. Its current prominence in Tennyson's oeuvre is the result of two trends, according to Tennyson scholar Matthew Rowlinson: the rise of formal English poetry studies in the late nineteenth century, and the Victorian
Victorian era
The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...

 effort to articulate a British culture that could be exported. He argues that "Ulysses" forms part of the prehistory of imperialism
Imperialism
Imperialism, as defined by Dictionary of Human Geography, is "the creation and/or maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationships, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination." The imperialism of the last 500 years,...

—a term that only appeared in the language in 1851. The protagonist sounds like a "colonial administrator", and his reference to seeking a newer world (57) echoes the phrase "New World
New World
The New World is one of the names used for the Western Hemisphere, specifically America and sometimes Oceania . The term originated in the late 15th century, when America had been recently discovered by European explorers, expanding the geographical horizon of the people of the European middle...

", which became common during the Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...

. While "Ulysses" cannot be read as overtly imperialistic, Tennyson's later work as Poet Laureate
Poet Laureate
A poet laureate is a poet officially appointed by a government and is often expected to compose poems for state occasions and other government events...

 sometimes argues for the value of Britain's colonies, or was accused of jingoism
Jingoism
Jingoism is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as extreme patriotism in the form of aggressive foreign policy. In practice, it is a country's advocation of the use of threats or actual force against other countries in order to safeguard what it perceives as its national interests...

. Rowlinson invokes the Marxist
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...

 theorist Louis Althusser's
Louis Althusser
Louis Pierre Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy....

 extension of the argument that ideology is ahistorical, finding that Tennyson's poem "comes before an ideological construction for which it nonetheless makes people nostalgic".

Literary and cultural legacy

In a 1929 essay, T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...

 called "Ulysses" a "perfect poem". An analogue of Ulysses is found in Eliot's "Gerontion
Gerontion
"Gerontion" is a poem by T. S. Eliot that was first published in 1920. The work relates the opinions and impressions of a gerontic, or elderly man, through a dramatic monologue which describes Europe after World War I through the eyes of a man who has lived the majority of his life in the 19th...

" (1920). Both poems are narrated by an aged man contemplating life's end. An excerpt from "Gerontion" reads as an ironic comment on the introductory lines of "Ulysses":


Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.
The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,
Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.

I am an old man,
A dull head among windy places. (13–17)


The Italian poet Giovanni Pascoli
Giovanni Pascoli
Giovanni Placido Agostino Pascoli was an Italian poet and classical scholar.- Biography :Giovanni Pascoli was born at San Mauro di Romagna , into a well-to-do family. He was the fourth of ten children of Ruggero Pascoli and Caterina Vincenzi Alloccatelli...

 (1855–1912) stated that his long lyric poem L'ultimo viaggio was an attempt to reconcile the portrayals of Ulysses in Dante and Tennyson with Tiresias
Tiresias
In Greek mythology, Tiresias was a blind prophet of Thebes, famous for clairvoyance and for being transformed into a woman for seven years. He was the son of the shepherd Everes and the nymph Chariclo; Tiresias participated fully in seven generations at Thebes, beginning as advisor to Cadmus...

's prophecy that Ulysses would die "a mild death off the sea". Pascoli's Ulysses leaves Ithaca to retrace his epic voyage rather than begin another.

"Ulysses" remains much admired, even as the twentieth century brought new interpretations of the poem. Professor of literature Basil Willey
Basil Willey
Basil Willey was a professor of English literature at Cambridge University and a prolific author of well-written and scholarly works on English literature and intellectual history....

 commented in 1956, "In 'Ulysses' the sense that he must press on and not moulder in idleness is expressed objectively, through the classical story, and not subjectively as his own experience. [Tennyson] comes here as near perfection in the grand manner as he ever did; the poem is flawless in tone from beginning to end; spare, grave, free from excessive decoration, and full of firmly controlled feeling."
In the fifteenth edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, often simply called Bartlett's, is an American reference work that is the longest-lived and most widely distributed collection of quotations...

 (1980), nine sections of "Ulysses", comprising 36 of the poem's 70 lines, are quoted, compared to but six in the ninth edition (1891).

Many readers have accepted the acclaimed last lines of "Ulysses" as inspirational. The poem's ending line has been used as a motto
Motto
A motto is a phrase meant to formally summarize the general motivation or intention of a social group or organization. A motto may be in any language, but Latin is the most used. The local language is usual in the mottoes of governments...

 by schools and other organisations. The final three lines are inscribed on a cross at Observation Hill
Observation Hill (McMurdo Station)
Observation Hill is a large hill adjacent to McMurdo Station in Antarctica and commonly called "Ob Hill." It is frequently climbed to get good viewing points across the continent. Regular clear skies give excellent visibility....

, Antarctica, to commemorate explorer Robert Falcon Scott
Robert Falcon Scott
Captain Robert Falcon Scott, CVO was a Royal Navy officer and explorer who led two expeditions to the Antarctic regions: the Discovery Expedition, 1901–04, and the ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition, 1910–13...

 and his party, who died on their return trek
Terra Nova Expedition
The Terra Nova Expedition , officially the British Antarctic Expedition 1910, was led by Robert Falcon Scott with the objective of being the first to reach the geographical South Pole. Scott and four companions attained the pole on 17 January 1912, to find that a Norwegian team led by Roald...

 from the South Pole
South Pole
The South Pole, also known as the Geographic South Pole or Terrestrial South Pole, is one of the two points where the Earth's axis of rotation intersects its surface. It is the southernmost point on the surface of the Earth and lies on the opposite side of the Earth from the North Pole...

 in 1912:


One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. (68–70)


United States Senator Edward Kennedy
Edward Kennedy
Edward Kennedy may refer to:*Ted Kennedy, Edward Moore "Ted" Kennedy , United States Senator from Massachusetts*Edward Kennedy , journalist who first reported the German surrender in World War II*Edward Kennedy, Jr., son of U.S...

 famously used an excerpt from the end of the poem, including "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield", in his speech to the 1980 Democratic National Convention
1980 Democratic National Convention
The 1980 National Convention of the U.S. Democratic Party nominated President Jimmy Carter for President and Vice President Walter Mondale for Vice President...

.

For the 2012 London Olympics, the final line was chosen to be carved into the long wall at the entrance to the athletes' village. One judge commented, "The aim was to find a line of poetry that somehow encapsulated the endeavour, the glory and the dance with failure that Olympic sport entails."

External links

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