Notes on Tennyson’s Ulysses

The myth of Ulysses has its origins in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and has survived through the ages.
Ulysses has always appealed to writers and artists as the symbol of an ever-lasting thirst for knowledge.
After Homer many other authors, such as for example Dante and Tennyson, have chosen the figure
Ulysses as the protagonist of their works and have reinterpreted the hero in their own way.

Let’s have a closer look at the way Homer, Dante and Tennyson have respectively dealt with this figure.

Homer - Iliad and Odyssey (c. 8th century BC)

In the Iliad Ulysses is portrayed as a cunning, brilliant speaker, who deceives the enemy by means of a
wooden horse, causing the fall of Troy.
In the Odyssey Ulysses is the wondering hero: thanks to his bravery, endurance, cleverness, resourcefulness
and wisdom he overcomes the hardship of the journey and after ten years comes back to his beloved wife
and kingdom.. He spends the rest of his life ON Ithaca.

In Homer Ulysses is a model for his bravery, cleverness, loyalty to his family, thirst of knowledge and
restoration of peace, law and order in his kingdom.

Dante – Divina Commedia, Inferno XXVI (1321)

In Dante Ulysses is a damned soul. He is punished in the eighth circle as the adviser who caused the fall of
Troy through the deception of the wooden horse. Dante describes him as a brilliant speaker and as a man
whose thirst for knowledge is greater than his love for Ithaca. Indeed, he dares to overcome the limits set
for man by God, identified in the Divina Commedia with the Pillars of Hercules (the Straits of Gibraltar).
He pays with his life for his daring attempt.

Dante’s Medieval perspective cannot take Ulysses as a model, as a positive hero because he aspires to go
beyond the limits of human knowledge set by the Christian God. On the one hand, Dante depicts Ulysses
as a fascinating hero and shares and understands his desire of knowledge; on the other, he cannot “forgive”
Ulysses for his extreme daring, not allowed from the point of view of the medieval religion.

Tennyson, Ulysses (1842)

In Tennyson Ulysses is an old king, bored with the commonplace life he leads on Ithaca.
His dissatisfaction with his present life, his regret for his adventurous past and his thirst for knowledge drive
him to sail again. Ulysses, a brilliant and great public speaker, manages to persuade his crew to join him.

In the poem the old Ulysses espresses his wish to go out again into the world to accomplish something, and
to pursue knowledge, rather than spending an idle life at home. In this respect, for the Victorians
Tennyson’s Ulysses epitomizes the “Victorian man of action” and the poem is the symbol of the constant
striving onwards of the civilized man. To fully understand the Victorian appreciation of the poem we must
take into account that the 19th century faith in science and progress had cancelled the medieval fear of going
beyond the human limits set by God and had given the utmost importance to human intelligence.