Lord Alfred Tennyson wrote  "Ulysses" after the death of his friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, in 1833. Right from the title, the intelligent reader can notice a connection with Ulyesses's character taken from Homer's "Odyssey" and from Dante's "Inferno" .

Dante puts Ulysses, a young man, in Hell because he dared to go beyond Hercules pillars. Tennyson's Ulysses is completely different from the first one: the protagonist is old. He is an idle king, who comes back to his island Ithaca to find out he doesn't appreciate it anymore. When Tennyson's Ulysses comes back to Ithaca, he noticed that the land is sterile, his wife is old and people are selfish and think just about hoard, sleep and feed. In this way, Tennyson criticizes indirectly the England society of 19^th century.

The poem is a dramatic monologue: it adopts the first person but the speaking voice and the poet don't correspond. Indeed the speaking voice is the dramatis persona. The dramatic monologue develops in Victorian ages and this leads to an emotional distance that gives a more objective view of things permitting the observer to have different points of view.