Talk:Poems (Tennyson, 1843)/Volume 2/Ulysses

why did he write this poem?? he wrote it because he was growing older and with him growing older he knew things would change

Live life to the fullest, do not waste time being idle. "Drink life to the lees..."

Like the 'pedia article says, tennyson was writing about what becomes of the hero after the quest.


 * Tennyson wrote the poem in 1833, when he was still in his 20s. Like most of his other good poems, it was apparently about him trying to get over being depressed about Hallam's death. According to the Norton Anthology: Tennyson himself stated that this poem expressed his own "need  of going forward and braving the struggle of life" after the death of Hallam. John Kenney 06:33, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Line breaks and stanzas
Very minor point but I noticed that there is not a line break after the fifth line of the poem here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174659 ; other sources also differ in how they break up the poem, if they do so at all. Also there are some irregularities with the indentations at the start of the stanzas. Is this intentional? If anyone's got some free time, it might be productive to track down the original book and see how the stanzas were broken up in Tennyson's 1842 book which included Ulysses. Someone out there could write a close reading on this for sure...
 * Good eye. A facsimile of the 1842 text on Google Books shows there is no linebreak there. Thanks for pointing that out! Prosody (talk) 05:52, 2 March 2016 (UTC)