“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” These simple words from “Ulysses” by Alfred Lord Tennyson became one of the most famous lines in poetry, and with them the acclaimed poet assumes the rousing eloquence which Homer’s epic hero might have had.
Written in 1833, the poem presents us with a portrait of Ulysses, as called by the Romans, or as known by the Greeks, Odysseus, after the events of Homer’s “Odyssey.”
Indeed, Tennyson’s dramatic monologue “Ulysses,” called a “perfect poem” by T.S. Eliot, is an apt demonstration of the persuasive capabilities of that Greek warrior who was renowned for his intellect. As a dramatic monologue, a form in which the poet assumes the voice of an individual character, the poem gives us Ulysses’s words, and thus the reader learns of the events through his perspective….