Notes about Lord Tennyson's Ulysses (18/4/12)

Ulysses is a dramatic monologue written by Lord Alfred Tennyson in 1833.
Dramatic monologue is a form of poetry which develops in the Victorian age. The features of a dramatic monologue are:
- it is written in the first person;
- the narrative voice belongs to a character (dramatis personae), different from the poet (in this way the reader is free to have a personal opinion about the character and about what he says, and he is also free to discover character's identity, pathologies and potential);
- it gives the reader the feelings that characterize this period: the social uneasiness and conflicts, the new aspects of life:
- it uses everyday language, in order to create interest and to adeguate it to human mind: there are deictics, a listener or a reader and fillers.
The innovation is also in the main character, Ulysess: he is old and tired of ordinary life. He wants to reflect about something that happened to him. Ulysses here does not want to live in his home anymore (Ithaca remembers T.S. Eliot's land in the poem The Waste Land). The idea of the course is taken from exoticism, that is Victorian interest into far and strange countries.
Ulysses wants to live all his life and it is possible to understand he is an intolerant man, who is not able to communicate with his countrymen.