Tennyson'sfollows the pattern of a few other
poems by Tennyson in being written in the voice of a character in Homeric epic, but either from
a viewpoint or perspective not found in Homer. In the case of Ulysses, the poem is narrated by
Odysseus after he has returned to Ithaca, settled down, and found domestic life in the poor
rocky island lacking in the grandeur and drama of his time fighting the Trojan War and returning
from Troy.
Generically, a dramaticis a stand-alone work written entirely in
the voice of a narrator distinct from the author addressed to either an explicit audience with
the reader understood as implicit audience or not having an explicit audience but being a
"dialogue of the mind with itself" which the reader can be said to overhear. Ulysses
conforms to this pattern, although it differs from Browning's dramatic monologues in that we
sympathize with rather than distrust the narrator.
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