The opening of the poem provides the fundamental social framework for the poem to operate within. As coined by his late companion, Tennyson was the ultimate ‘poet of sensation’, and Hallam was very much at the core of his expressions of the universality of masculine sensations of mourning. Of course, in this poem Tennyson refers to the heroes of Homer, but reading from a post-Tennyson perspective, we can perhaps draw parallels between Ulysses as the war hero, and Tennyson as a literary hero of Victorian sensationalism. I believe Tennyson’s narrative operates outside of the constraints of ancient myth, and instead employs the hypermasculine character of Ulysses to communicate the pressures of the male experience, particularly with regards to our conceptions of heroism. I would focus more narrowly on the inwardly facing narrative of the poem, as a melancholic reflection of Tennyson’s struggle to come to terms with the finality of endings and the death of his late companion, Arthur Hallam. Whilst previous scholarship has acutely focused on the textual traditions of Homeric implication on Tennyson’s Ulysses. The poet’s ambiguity surrounding time as a destructive force in bringing the imminence of death is paradoxically offset by the ignorance of Ulysses in his feeble attempts to deconstruct time and mould its trajectory and speed to his own impulses. This transcendence of time and text perfectly illustrates the sensation of mourning as an indiscriminate force of the human condition that permeates all temporalities and is just as prevalent in contemporary society as we read it in works of classical mythology.Ĭertainly, this notion of continuity through time is not confined to our historical understandings of the poem, but also embeds itself within Tennyson’s writings as a commodity to be won through physical and spiritual voyage. The layered intertextuality and multiplicity of Ulysses as a symbol of masculine heroism in decline works to express Tennyson’s own personal expressions of grief and loss. Tennyson’s nuanced reworking of Homeric epic in his Ulysses (1842) is monumental in its binding of ancient and modernist narratives. Ulixes mosaic at the Bardo Museum in Tunis, Tunisia.
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