Alfred Tennyson wrote Ulysses in October 1833, the year of his friend Hallam's death.

Was this sad event to inspired a poem which expressed “the need of going forward and braving the struggle of life”.

Ulysses was the king of Ithaca and one of the leaders of the Greek army in the trojan war. Homer, in the Odyssey,describes how, after the Greek victory, he was destined to wander for ten years over the seas before returning home. When he finally reached his island kingdom, he had to fight to regain his wife and his power. Tennyson's poem is about what happened after the hero's return to Ithaca.

He has returnedto resume his duties as a ruler, but he finds that he is bored with these “common duties” (line 40). He wants to leave “the sceptre and the isle” (line 34) to the calm and Thoughtful Telemachus set out on a final voyage, “to sail beyond the sunset”(line60).

The poem is in the form of a drammatic monologue and the dramatis personae is Ulysses whose attitudes and emotion are actually Tennyson's own. It is arranged in three section: the first represents a sort of introduction to the protagonist's history and his present situation, the second is address to Telemachus, his son, and the last to his mariners.

In the first section Ulysses defines his self as “an idle king” to underline how is wasted his life on Ithaca. The life on the island is uncivilized and bleak and lacks excitement. Negative adjectives such as “still”, “barren”, “aged”, “unequal”, “savage” convey the character's total dissatisfaction with life on Ithaca. The parallel between Ulysses and the writer makes think the intelligent reader that there's a relation also between Ithaca and England. In this way words concerning the semantic field of economics such as “profits”, “mete”, “dole”, “unequal” and “hoard” could be interpret as a critic to the utilitarianism of the Victorian age.