Ulysses

Alexandrina Victoria became Queen Victoria in 1837 and ruled England until her death in 1901, a period of more than 63 years. At the time of her death, Victoria was the longest-reigning monarch in British history. Tennyson became the Poet Laureate of England during Victoria’s reign in 1850. Tennyson also died during Victoria’s reign in 1892. From 1850 until his death, Tennyson was perhaps the most famous living poet in England, and “Ulysses” is among his most famous works. The term “Victorian” was not, however, used during Tennyson’s lifetime, or Victoria’s for that matter. English people and English poets living during the Victorian era thought of themselves as modern. The label “Victorian” was placed on this period after the fact; and “Victorian” is not a purely descriptive term, rather it comes with negative connotations. As the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms explains,

The term `Victorian’ was not used within the period itself, but gained currency from about 1918, the year in which Lytton Strachey’s disrespectful biographical essays were published as Eminent Victorians. In a largely anti-Victorian climate of opinion during much of the 20th century, the term acquired a range of derogatory connotations arising from caricatured presentations of ‘the Victorians’ as blindly imperialistic, self-satisfied, humourlessly religiose, hypocritically sentimental, and above all sexually repressed. The serious appreciation of Victorian literature and culture has struggled against such perceptions (“Victorian.” The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, edited by Chris Baldick, 4th ed., Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 378).

Victorians witnessed immense technological progress and rapid industrialization, and they grappled with scientific advancements that challenged religious faith, including Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Victorian poets wrestled with the anxieties and social upheavals brought about by these cultural changes in their work. Victorian poets were also more experimental with forms than their critics often give them credit for—for example, Tennyson wrote In Memoriam, an elegy in fragments; Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote Aurora Leigh, a novel in verse; and Matthew Arnold wrote “Dover Beach,” a lyric experimenting with a freer verse than much of the poetry that came before. “Ulysses” falls into this experimental category also because the poem takes a character from Homer’s epics, but instead of retelling—or even revising—Homer, Tennyson begins where Homer left off, with Ulysses back home in Ithaca. Additionally, Tennyson writes “Ulysses” as a dramatic monologue instead of an epic or a narrative poem.