Poetry

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10 9 8 7 6 5
Ulysses
Alfred, Lord Tennyson

1833
Introduction

“Ulysses” is based upon the Odyssey, written by the Greek poet Homer, who is
known to have lived some time before 700 B.C. In that tale, Ulysses is gone
from his home for thirty years: for ten years he is involved in fighting in the
Trojan war, and the journey back from Troy to his homeland of Ithaca takes him
through a series of adventures that last another twenty years. Another source that
Tennyson is assumed to have used, that is similar in spirit to this poem, is the
Inferno, by Dante Alighieri. In Canto XXVI of that poem, Ulysses is unable to
give up his life of adventure and returns to the sea, as he does in this poem.

“Ulysses” was written in 1833 but not published until 1842, in Tennyson’s
Poems. This collection marked the poet’s return to publication after a period
referred to as his “ten years’silence.” Tennyson has identified the source of the
poem’s emotion as rising from his feelings about the death of his college friend,
Arthur Hallam, when Tennyson was twenty four. Although they knew each other
for only five years, Hallam had a profound influence on Tennyson’s life and
work. (One of the poet’s greatest accomplishments, the long poem In
Memoriam, directly addresses his feelings about Hallam’s life and early death.)
Tennyson related his friend’s death to this tale of a Ulysses’ desire to return to a
life of adventure on the sea when he noted in his Memoir that the poem “gave
my feelings about going forward, and braving the struggle of life.”

Tennyson’s noble sentiment is not entirely accurate in describing this poem,

though. The speaker of this poem is braving life’s struggles to some extent, but
he is also abandoning his family and responsibilities in what some have called a
selfish pursuit of adventure. Ulysses’ feelings about adventure are best expressed
in lines 19-20, where the speaker observes that “all experience is an arch
wherethrough / Gleams that untravelled world....” The experiences of Ulysses’
travels away from home have opened bridges to new adventures that are so
attractive, or gleaming, that going for them can be seen equally as being either
brave or self-gratifying.
Author Biography

Tennyson was born in 1809 in Somersby, Lincolnshire. The fourth of twelve

children, he was the son of a clergyman who maintained his office grudgingly
after his younger brother had been named heir to their father’s wealthy estate.
According to biographers, Tennyson’s father, a man of violent temper, responded
to his virtual disinheritance by indulging in drugs and alcohol. Each of the
Tennyson children later suffered through some period of drug addiction or
mental and physical illness, prompting the family’s grim speculation on the
“black blood” of the Tennysons. Biographers surmise that the general
melancholy expressed in much of Tennyson’s verse is rooted in the unhappy
environment at Somersby.

Tennyson enrolled at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1827. There he met Arthur

Hallam, a brilliant undergraduate who became Tennyson’s closest friend and
ardent admirer of his poetry. Hallam’s enthusiasm was welcomed by Tennyson,
whose personal circumstances had led to a growing despondency: his father died
in 1831, leaving Tennyson’s family in debt and forcing his early departure from
school; one of Tennyson’s brothers suffered a mental breakdown and required
institutionalization; and Tennyson himself was morbidly fearful of falling victim
to epilepsy or madness. Hallam’s untimely death in 1833, which prompted the
series of elegies later comprising In Memoriam, contributed greatly to
Tennyson’s despair. In describing this period, he wrote: “I suffered what seemed
to me to shatter all my life so that I desired to die rather than to live.” For nearly
a decade after Hallam’s death Tennyson published no poetry. During this time he
became engaged to Emily Sell-wood, but financial difficulties and Tennyson’s
persistent anxiety over the condition of his health resulted in their separation. In
1842 an unsuccessful financial venture cost Tennyson nearly everything he
owned, causing him to succumb to a deep depression that required medical
treatment. Tennyson later resumed his courtship of Sellwood, and they were
married in 1850. The timely success of In Memoriam, published that same year,
ensured Tennyson’s appointment as Poet Laureate, succeeding William
Wordsworth. In 1883 Tennyson accepted a peerage, the first poet to be so
honored strictlgy on the basis of literary achievement. Tennyson died in 1892
and was interred in Poet’s Corner of Westminister Abbey.
Poem Summary

Lines 1-5

This poem begins with Ulysses having come home from the thirty-year
adventure(which included participation in the Trojan War) that is the subject of
Homer’s long poem, “The Odyssey,” and having resumed his position as king of
Ithaca. This opening stanza establishes the speaker’s discontent in its first words,
“It little profits,” and goes on to describe the role of king in negative,
unappealing terms: the land he rules is seen as “these barren crags,” his wife
“aged,” and even the traditionally most comforting image of home life, the
fireplace hearth, is “still,” offering no warmth. The king’s subjects are described
as “a savage race,” and their actions, sleeping and eating, are basic animal
behavior; the only thing they do that might require human thought, the capacity
to see beyond the immediate moment, is the greedy act of hoarding.

But the speaker balances this unflattering view of his home and subjects with
contempt for himself. He describes himself as “an idle king,” and notes the
unfairness of the laws that he passes, calling them “unequal.” By the end of the
stanza, it becomes clear that the problem with his reign is not the shortcomings
of either his subjects or himself, but the fact that he is not mentally matched to
the people he leads. He feels distant from the people that he is supposed to rule
because they “know not me.” Here Tennyson gently implies Ulysses’ wisdom,
by making him realize that a king and his subjects are not suited if they cannot
understand each other. He also implies that there is a bit of egotism involved on
Ulysses’ part by having him phrase the misunderstanding in this way, instead of
“I know not them” or “we know not each other.”
Lines 6-17

In these lines Ulysses remembers his travels fondly, even those times when he
was alone and those times when he was sailing a turbulent sea. Line 6 contains a
structure(Ulysses making a direct statement about himself, followed by a
semicolon that indicates that further explanation is to come) that will be repeated
two more times in this stanza, in lines 11 and 18. The “lees” referred to in line 7
are the sediment at the bottom of a cup of wine: in his enthusiasm to “drink life
to the lees” the speaker wants to fully experience all things, good and bad. The
Hyades mentioned in line 10 are sisters, daughters of Atlas, who according to
legend were turned into a constellation of stars by Zeus, king of the gods. By
saying that they vexed, or tormented, the sea with blowing sheets of
rain(“scudding drifts”), the speaker is suggesting that the constellation influences
the sea and weather, as he is describing the worst conditions that a sailor might
face. Even although he is as aware of the horror and danger as he is of the quiet
times, he still wants, as stated in line 6, to travel again.

The unusual diction of “I am become a name” in line 11 gives the phrase an

unmoving, static quality, removing some of the minor motion that would be
implied by “I have become a name”: this strengthens the contrast between
Ulysses’ present stationary life with all of the action the poem has described.
Being a name grants Ulysses the glory of the legend that is associated with his
name(as described in lines 12-17), but it also reduces his existence to just one
word.

Lines 18-21

In these lines, Ulysses states the philosophic problem that is troubling him: he
has had an effect on everything that he has come into contact with, but every
experience has inevitably led to more experiences(every experience is an “arch”
or passage to new experiences—“that untravelled world”). However, like the
horizon, which always recedes as you try to approach it, the border(“margin”) of
that new world “fades” away as Ulysses moves toward it.

Lines 22-32

In this section of the poem, Ulysses convinces himself that the best thing to do
would be to leave Ithaca and become a wanderer again. To start with, in lines 22
and 23 he makes the quiet inactive life seem not only boring but useless. The
word “dull” in line 22 suggests boredom, but line 23—which evokes the image
of a sword that rusts when it is unpolished(“unburnished”) and shines when it is
used—subtly connects dullness with uselessness, implying that while he is
inactive Ulysses feels as useless as a dull(meaning both blunt and unpolished)
sword. (This is a good example of what many people like about poetry: the
packing of a lot of meaning into just a few words.) With his exclamation in line
24, in which he makes a distinction between truly living and simply breathing,
his thought takes on a sense of urgency. Lines 24-26 indicate that many lives
would not be enough for this speaker, and that there is not much left of the one
he has. Each hour saved from death, therefore, must not be a mere passage of
time, but rather be made meaningful with new experience. After he considers(in
lines 28-30) that leaving this potential unfulfilled would even be ignoble(“vile it
were ... to store and hoard myself), the stanza ends with grand, uplifting
language in the last two lines. What was previously portrayed as discomfort and
discontent becomes a noble quest “to follow knowledge like a sinking star /
Beyond the utmost bond of human thought.”

Lines 33-43

In this stanza Ulysses describes his son Telemachus, who is to take over control
of the kingdom when he leaves. It is important that Tennyson has Ulysses state
his bond to Telemachus twice in line 33(“my son, mine own”) because the son is
then described by the father as having the opposite qualities to his own.
Telemachus and his actions are described using words like “discerning,”
“prudent,” “soft,” “good,” “blameless,” “centered,” and “tender,” qualities that
come from the kind of cautious living that Ulysses has already established is not
for him. Still, he recognizes that a personality like Telemachus’ is better suited
than his own to “make mild / A rugged people” (lines 36-7). Regardless of what
Ulysses might admire in-Telemachus, and how confident he is of his son’s ability
to lead the population of Ithaca, the stanza ends with a flat statement that points
out the basic difference between father and son: “He works his work, I mine.”

Lines 44-53

The first two lines of this stanza continue a tendency, begun in the previous
stanza with “this is my son,” to localize the setting of this poem in a particular
place (“There lies the port”; “There gloom the dark, broad seas”). By line 45, the
physical location is so directly established that the speaker, who for most of the
poem speaks to no one in particular or speaks to himself, directly addresses the
mariners who have sailed with him before. This apparent inconsistency in the
narrative voice has been identified by some critics as a flaw in Tennyson’s
presentation.

The verb used in conjunction with the seas in line 45 is “gloom,” which is
commonly used as a noun today; this is a way for Ulysses to mention, as he did
earlier in the poem, the bad aspects of the life he desires as well as the good.
This wide scope of events is shown even more directly in line 48, where he
brings up “the thunder and the sunshine.” Line 47 uses another familiar word in
an unfamiliar way: “frolic,” which is used today as a verb and sometimes as a
noun, is an adjective here, describing the mariners’ welcome of the weather.

In lines 48-49, Ulysses makes reference to the fact that he and his crew “opposed
/ Free hearts, free foreheads.” Since most Greek city-states operated under
systems of slavery, many of the opponents Ulysses faced in battle were slaves.
By specifying that his mariners “opposed” adversity with free in hearts and
minds, Ulysses presumably is emphasizing the nobility of his crew, stressing that
they were not mere slaves who met challenges because they were forced to.
Similarly, line 53, in referring to the Greek gods who, according to legend,
played an active part in the Trojan war, he inspires his men with pride in their
past accomplishments. In addition, this suggests that not only are these men
much more than slaves, they are rivals to the gods.

Lines 54-61

The imagery of lines 54 and 55 is of sunset, a fitting time of departure for a ship
full of old men who know that they will probably not survive the journey. In
lines 55-6, the sound the ocean makes is suggestive of the moans of sailors who
have already died and sunk into the deep sea. Even while reminding his men of
their impending death(and, in line 61, of his own impending death), Ulysses
encourages them to “seek a newer world,” and to brace themselves in the boat in
order to bring their oars down vigorously against the sea’s waves—“smite the
sounding furrows.” Their destination is nowhere specific, just west, “beyond the
sunset, and the baths / Of all the western stars,” echoing the desire that Ulysses
stated in line 31 “to follow knowledge like a sinking star.” Here knowledge does
not refer to learned, orderly information, but to experience. The “baths”
mentioned in line 60 refers to the outer ocean which ancient people believed
surrounded the earth; thus, as the stars set in the west, they would descend into
the “bath” of this ocean.

Lines 62-70

The Happy Isles in line 63 refers to Elysium, also known as Elysian Fields. In
Greek mythology, this was the place where the blessed went after death.
According to legend, Achilles went to Elysium after being killed in the battle of
Troy.
In line 67, Ulysses says of himself “that which we are, we are,” repeating the
sound and spirit of his statement about Telemachus in line 43: “He works his
work, I mine.” Although there are places in the poem where Ulysses seems eager
to depart on another voyage, the dominant tone, as shown in these two phrases,
is that he feels he is a victim of his fate, that he and the mariners who sail with
him must, despite the ravages of “time and fate” (line 69), continue to
experience life as fully as possible. Ulysses uses the powerful wording in the
final line to encourage his men, despite circumstances that will probably
overwhelm them. Although Ulysses has been seen through the years both as a
quitter who cannot take society and a brave man following his fate, the tone of
this last line supports Tennyson’s assertion in his Memoir that the poem is about
“braving the struggle of life.”
Themes

Culture Clash

The first stanza of this poem establishes the irony of holding the honored
position of ruler of a nation but being completely unimpressed, or even bothered,
by it because the population is so different in temperament than the ruler.
Ulysses is not displeased with his subjects, but with the entire situation: true, he
calls them a “savage race,” but he uses the phrase more descriptively than
judgementally and with the same acceptance in his tone that he has when he says
the laws he hands down are “unequal” and that he himself is an “idle king.”
What troubles Ulysses in this poem is not that his subjects are rugged, his wife is
old, or that he himself is more inclined to wander than to sit still, but that all of
these elements are forced together. There is nothing unusual about a ruler who is
not happy with the people he controls. What is unique about Ulysses’situation is
that he is aware of his own limits—while he has power to give his people
commands, he cannot change them. He knows himself: he is a man of war, not of
politics; he is a man who understands how to make ships follow the currents, but
he cannot steer his subjects toward civility, even if he knew what it was. In his
description of Telemachus, he acknowledges what the traits of a good peacetime
ruler would be: “soft,” “slow,” “tender,” “centered in the sphere of common
duties,” and willing to pay tribute to the lower-order gods, the ones who watch
over the household. Ulysses knows that he is not the man to civilize Ithaca, and
he accepts it; as he says in the 67th line, “that which we are, we are.” His
personality is the exact opposite of a good peacetime leader, and he, either
because of born personality or because of his twenty years of adventure, is best
suited “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
 Topics for Further Study

Write a sequel about a famous literary figure, picking up after the end of the
story that we all know. Explain how the main character feels about going home
after the original action is finished.

Imagine that you are a citizen of Ithaca, and that the king, coming home after
being gone for twenty years, has left again. What do you think of him? Would
you be happier with Telemachus on the throne than with Ulysses? Write a letter
to Ulysses, telling him how things are going at home since he left the second
time.

Are there still people in the world today who feel as Ulysses felt? Where do you
find them? What jobs do they have?

Growth and Development

The most obvious thing about Ulysses as he is presented in this poem is that he
does not seem to believe that he can develop into a good king for Ithaca, but
instead considers himself to be stuck forever with the personality he currently
has. He sees that Telemachus would be a good ruler and, far from wanting to
acquire that type of personality, proclaims, “He works his work, I mine.” To a
degree, this attitude reveals a man who is suspicious concerning things of the
mind, who believes in action, not in personal growth. He does not have the
imagination to let him see himself as the type of ruler Telemachus is. Another
possible interpretation is that he feels that he could be a great king, but does not
feel motivated to work toward it. In calling his old crew together to sail from
Ithaca, he tells them, “Some work of noble note may yet be done / Not
unbecoming men that strove with Gods.” There is no clear answer to whether he
feels unable to develop into the leader of Ithaca or he just chooses not to.

Throughout the poem, there is evidence of Ulysses’ growth, in his constant

references to what old age is like. Although he does present himself as a
wanderer by nature, he also shows how his nature has been changed throughout
his life, if only because each moment is making him think more and more about
death. “Though much is taken, much abides,” he says in the final stanza. A few
lines later he clarifies that he means physical ability was taken when he says he
has been “Made weak by time and fate.” The Ulysses of this poem makes much
of the fact that he and his men are the adventurous types who are not content to
stay still; he mentions after the fact that they are old and near death. With these
ideas he implies, but true to his character does not think much about, the fact that
his ideas are developing with age into a need to keep active in order to escape
death.

Politics

When we think of politics, we think of the struggle for public approval, because
in a democracy the leaders are held accountable for their actions by the voting
public. In a monarchy like Ithaca, though, that accountability is removed, and the
business of politics can practice a more useful goal: bringing peace to society.
Since the country of this poem is populated by a “savage” race, a politician’s job,
as Ulysses sees it, is to “subdue them to the useful and the good.” In theory, at
least, Ulysses’ travels should make him an effective politician, because he has
been exposed to different sorts of governments and councils that could give him
theories to apply in ruling. But he does not have the patience to transform his
experiences into practice. He only hungers for more experience. In Telemachus,
Ulysses sees the qualities that are needed in order to change the people from the
way they are into what they should be. He is “discerning,” “blameless,”
“centered,” and “decent.” In a time of war, when there is a clearly defined enemy
outside of the population, these qualities might make a leader too indecisive or
easy to manipulate. In governing a civilized state, a leader might not need to
present such a strong moral example, but in civilizing savages, this poem tells
us, a great degree of gentleness is required.
Style

This poem is written in iambic pentameter. Iambic means that the rhythm is in
segments of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable.
Pentameter(from the Greek word “penta,” which means “five”) means that there
are five of these segments—five feet—on each line. Iambic meter is the most
common metric pattern used in English poetry because it resembles the natural
rise and fall of the way we ordinarily speak the language. This meter is so
natural that in reading a poem like “Ulysses,” which has no rhyme scheme or
evenly divided stanzas to indicate that there is indeed structure, a casual reader
might not notice that this poem has a metric pattern at all. The fact that this
poem has a constant rhythm and the lines have the same number of syllables
gives the reader a sense of the poet’s control without making the reader feel
manipulated.

Because the poem lacks rhyming words at the ends of lines, its form is called
blank verse. A speaker who addresses an audience in blank verse gives the
impression of being individualistic, an independent thinker, not bound by
convention. By contrast, a speaker whose thoughts are strictly organized around
rhymes may seem to have thoughts that fit more clearly into recognized social
patterns. From the subject matter of the poem, we can see that the speaker of
“Ulysses” is not repeating common ideas but is saying what is deep within his
heart, and this lack of decoration in his language supports that understanding.

One more technique that is prominent in this poem is the use of enjambment—
the running over of a sentence or thought from one line to the next without any
punctuation at the end of the line. Like the use of blank verse, this technique
gives the impression that the speaker’s thoughts are not prepared for presentation
to the reader, but are flowing down the page in a manner close to how they
would flow through Ulysses’ mind. The lines that do come to a complete stop at
the end therefore draw more attention to themselves, because of their rarity.
These lines often have a caesura, or pause, in the middle, as in line 23(“To rust
unburnished, not to shine in use!”), line 43(“When I am gone. He works his
work, I mine.”), and line 41(“Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old”).
By varying the poem’s pacing, alternating long streams with fragmented lines,
Tennyson makes the structure mimic Ulysses’ thoughts, which mostly charge
forward but have moments of hesitation.
Historical Context

“Ulysses” was written in late 1833, soon after Tennyson received news of the
death of his dearest friend, Alfred Henry Hallam. Tennyson’s son, Hallam
Tennyson, reported in a biography of Tennyson published after the author’s
death that his father acknowledged the poem as an effect of his grief and said
that writing the poem “gave my feeling about the need for going forward, and
braving the struggle of life ...” Beyond the personal significance to the writer,
“Ulysses” is a product of its times, the second bloom of the Romantic Period
when it was already established as an artistic movement: a period commonly
referred to as the Age of Romantic Triumph.

Because the Romantic Period was not an official organization but is a way we
use of designating the spirit of the times, no strictly undisputable dates can be
attached to it. This philosophical and artistic movement is generally recognized
to have grown out of the social turmoil of the late 1700s—which included the
American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1794—and to have
solidified during the Napoleonic Wars, which affected all of European society.
Most critics agree with placing the starting date of the Romantic Period in 1798,
when William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published the
groundbreaking Lyrical Ballads. There is, however, some dispute about what to
consider the period’s end: some emphasize the continuation of the Romantic
spirit through 1870, when novelist Charles Dickens died, while others emphasize
the change in the public mood after Queen Victoria took the throne in 1837.
There seems to be no reason the Romantic and Victorian periods cannot be seen
to exist during the same period, depending upon what elements of a work are
being examined.

The Romantic Period came about when the development of democracy and the
growth of cities forced artists and philosophers to focus attention on the
individual and to question the suffering that they might, in an earlier time, have
been able to avoid seeing or considering. It was a time of optimism, of
advancing the belief that society, whatever its problems, can be perfected. It was
a time of humanism, as people came to care more about other people. It was a
time when the arts came to be looked to, not only as tools of communication, but
as important in and of themselves; genius and creativity were valued. In Lyrical
Ballads, Wordsworth called poetry “the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings,” making poetic expression morally equal to nature, and he revered
nature. Romanticism embraced the individual and rejected the previous century’s
values of harmony, balance, idealized perfection, and Classicism.

“Ulysses” has some elements of the coming Victorian attitude that eventually
settled on the country (just as Tennyson eventually proved to be so favored that
Queen Victoria appointed him Poet Laureate in 1850), but the poem’s influences
are strictly Romantic. The early part of Romanticism, called the Age of
Romantic Triumph or, sometimes, the Classical Romantic Period, was an
especially vibrant time in literature, as writers fought to throw off the
expectations of the generation before them, to cope with the confusion of the
world, and to cope with the new-found respect that was given to artists. For
example, an eighteenth-century poem or painting might depict a tale from
ancient Greece that had been told before, and it might be admired for the smart
handling of technique that the artist displayed. A Romantic writer, such as Sir
Walter Scott, might write about the history of his own country(as in Ivanhoe), or,
like Tennyson, he might use a classical situation but give the hero a new level of
psychological depth.

Compare & Contrast

1833: Parliament passed a bill that freed slaves in all British colonies.
1865: The American Civil War ended and the 13th Amendment outlawed
slavery in the United States.

1991: The apartheid system in South Africa, which segregated the country’s
blacks from the whites, was abolished.

Today: Official government policies that support oppression of ethnic

groups are rare, but increasingly, ethnic hostilities are the causes of wars.

1833: Oberlein College became the first U.S. college to admit women.

1920: The Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote.

1995: The Supreme Court ruled that the Citadel, a military academy
accepting federal funds, must admit women.

1833: Andrew Jackson became the first president of the United States to
ride a train.

1861: Abraham Lincoln’s train ride from Illinois to his inauguration in

Washington D.C. was used for publicity, as it was the first time many of the
voters who elected him would have a chance to see him.

Today: With air transportation, there is no need for politicians to ride

trains, but many use the traditional “whistle-stop” tour as a campaign
gimmick.

In the 1800s, Romanticism spread across the globe, and some of the great
practitioners in every field of art have either been part of the Romantic
movement or, like Tennyson, have been influenced by it without following all of
its principles. The names we most readily identify with Romanticism are the
poets Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Byron. American authors
writing at the same time who shared a similar outlook are Irving, Hawthorne,
Longfellow, and Poe. We also see the Romantic influence worldwide in Mary
Shelley, Victor Hugo, Stendhal, Pushkin, and Dumas.
Critical Overview

“Ulysses” is generally well-regarded by critics, because of the thoughts with

which it deals. The poem captures the heroic mood of the seafaring wanderer
that has charmed Western civilization since the original tales of Ulysses from
antiquity, but it also adds the twist of the father abandoning his responsibilities to
follow the call of adventure, while leaving his son to be a sensible ruler of the
land. In an 1885 review, novelist George Eliot compared “Ulysses” to Homer’s
ancient work. Tennyson’s poem, she claimed, “is a pure little ingot of the same
gold that runs through the ore of the Odyssey. It has the ’ large utterance’ of the
early epic, with that rich fruit of moral experience which it has required
thousands of years to ripen.” In a 1903 essay, another famous novelist, G. K.
Chesterton, expressed his admiration for Tennyson’s overall ability to plant
radical ideas into seemingly conventional works: “Underneath all of his exterior
of polished and polite rectitude there was in him a genuine fire of novelty; only
that, like all the able men of his period, he disguised revolution under the name
of evolution.”

Concerning the way Tennyson’s ideas are expressed, however, critics have been
less impressed with “Ulysses.” T. S. Eliot noted, as other critics have, that,
regardless of his other gifts, Tennyson was at his weakest when trying to tell a
story. “[F]or narrative Tennyson had no gift at all,” Eliot wrote in a 1936 essay.
“For a static poem, and a moving poem, on the same subject, you have only to
compare his ’ Ulysses’ with the condensed and intensely exciting narrative of
that hero in the XXVIth Canto of Dante’s Inferno.” Although Tennyson does use
his gift for describing nature to some extent in “Ulysses,” there is some
dissatisfaction with the extent to which he does not. Herbert F. Tucker, in his
essay “Tennyson and the Measure of Doom,” stated the commonly held opinion
that “his poetic renderings of natural phenomena are rarely less than brilliant”;
but, as Rhonda L. Flaxman stated in her 1987 analysis, his brilliance is
underused in this particular poem: “’ Ulysses’ contains memorable flashes of
visual imagery—for example, the lines ’ to follow knowledge like a sinking star’
or ’ the lights begin to twinkle from the rocks / The long day wanes; the slow
moon climbs; the deep / Moans round with many voices.’ This suggestion of
setting, enormously successful because so carefully selected and so rhythmically
appropriate, is not allowed to flower into a fully developed description.”
 What Do I Read Next?

The Odyssey of Homer is the original tale of Ulysses’ ten-year journey to return
to Ithaca after the Trojan War. The translation by Robert Fitzgerald(1978) is
considered the most authoritative and readable.

Douglas Bush’s Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry gives
background material about how Tennyson and his peers made use of ancient
verse to express their aesthetic ideals.

The Golden Bough by Sir James George Frazier is one of the most influential
texts in history about primitive practices and beliefs across all cultures. When
Ulysses calls his people a “savage race,” this book shows what their beliefs
might have been. The reader who is interested in the development of society will
be fascinated by the diverse cultural beliefs represented here.

In Moby Dick, especially the early chapters, Herman Melville captures the
sensibilities of men of all eras who have been drawn to a life at sea. This book
was published in 1833, approximately the same time that Tennyson wrote
“Ulysses.”

The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson are published in three volumes. The volume
that covers Hallam’s death and the writing of this poem is Volume I: 1821-1850,
which was published in 1981 and edited by Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon.
Sources

Chesterton, G. K., “Tennyson,” in Varied Types, Dodd, Mead and Co., 1903, pp.
249-57.

Eliot, George. “Belles Lettres,” The Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review,
Vol. LXIV, No. CXXVI, October, 1855, pp. 596-615.

Eliot, T. S., “In Memoriam,” in Essays Ancient & Modern, Faber & Faber
Limited, 1936, pp. 175-90.

Flaxman, Rhonda L., “Tennyson,” in Victorian Word-Painting and Narrative:

Toward the Blending of Genders, UMI Research Press, 1983, pp. 73-124.

Ricks, Christopher B., ed. The Poems of Tennyson. 3 vols. Essex: Longman,
1987.

Tennyson, Hallam. Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by his Son. 2 vols.

London: Macmillan, 1897, 1906.

Tucker, Herbert F., “Tennyson and the Measure of Doom,” PMLA, Volume 98,
No. 1, January 1983, pp. 8-20.
For Further Study

Killham, John, “Tennyson and Victorian Social Values,” Tennyson, edited by D.

J. Palmer, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. 1973, pp. 147-179.

The author argues convincingly that the sensibilities that formed this poem fit
more closely with social attitudes prevailing twenty years later. This work is
more focused on the era of Tennyson’s greatest recognition, notably the 1850s
on, than about the early poems, but it gives a good sense of Tennyson the man.

Kissane, James, Alfred Tennyson, New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1970.

Kissane’s analysis of the poems is very involved and clear: he looks at

Tennyson’s works as poems, not as pieces of history, and writes about them in a
way that is easy to understand. This book is a good start for the reader who
wants to understand Tennyson as a craftsman.

Ricks, Christopher, Tennyson, New York: The MacMillian Company, 1972.

This author gives a detailed background of Tennyson’s life and career around the
time that “Ulysses” was written, intertwining literary themes with background
information.