One of the intriguing aspects of Tennysons Ulysses is the fact that he sets his monologue years after the events of the Odyssey

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Odysseus was the hero of the ancient Greek poet Homer’s great epic poem, the Odyssey. Homer’s earlier epic, the Iliad tells the story of Achilles and the other mythological heroes of the Trojan War. After the Trojan Prince Paris abducted the legendary beauty Helen of Troy from her husband, the Greek Menelaus, the Greeks launched a ten-year war against the Trojans in an effort to win Helen back. After a long and difficult war, the Greeks finally defeated the Trojans, and the Greek warriors returned to their homes in Greece. Odysseus’s homeward journey, an arduous ten-year journey filled with many dangers, distractions, and adventures, comprises the story of the Odyssey.

One of the intriguing aspects of Tennyson’s “Ulysses” is the fact that he sets his monologue years after the events of the Odyssey — after Odysseus’s many adventures on his journey, and after his long efforts to reclaim his household on the island of Ithaca. During his twenty-year absence, a host of greedy suitors had been hanging around his home, trying to convince Odysseus’s lovely wife Penelope to give up waiting for her husband to return and to marry one of them instead. Tennyson’s Ulysses is an old man, apparently addressing a group of men in an effort to raise a new crew for one final adventure at sea. The situation may have been suggested in part by the old prophet Tiresias’ mysterious prediction of Odysseus’ death in Book 11 of the Odyssey, in which he predicted that Odysseus would return home to Ithaca after many hardships, slay the suitors in his house, and finally that death would come to Odysseus in some manner from the sea, once he had become an old man.

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The content of Tennyson’s poem, however, follows the great Italian poet Dante’s version of the character more than Homer’s. In fact, Tennyson’s choice of the Latinized name “Ulysses” as the poem’s title emphasizes this connection. In Canto 26 of Dante’s Inferno (one of the three parts of his great work The Divine Comedy), Dante visits the many levels of Hell and meets Ulysses, who is being punished there for his deceitfulness, a fact that also may affect one’s interpretation of Tennyson’s “Ulysses” as being less than the “ideal” hero. Ulysses tells Dante about his final voyage and describes his quest to sail ...

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