The critical tradition on Tennyson prefers to see him as a sophisticated and refined elegiac poet who officiates mild Christian wisdom and bland anxieties of religious faith against the spreading scientism. This study of the sources and the models elaborated in Tennyson’s Ulysses (1842) demonstrates the way in which the poet disrupted, through the reshaping of the Homeric tragic hero, the solid system of values standing at the base of the Empire. This essay throws light on the rich intertextual system on which the poem is based. Particular attention is given to classical sources such as the Odyssey (Book XI, ll. 100-37), Sophocles’s Ajax and Philoctetes, Euripide’s Hecuba, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, (13.183), Seneca’s Troades and modern ones, starting with Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (III.iii. from line 150 onwards) and echoes from poets such as Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley. In Tennyson’s poem this complex and elaborated system is welded together with a lacerated Victorian sensibility. Particular attention is also paid to the reflection on the relationship with the past, seen through the prism of Dante’s Inferno (Canto XXVI, lines 90-126). The essay also throws light on a still unacknowledged, or neglected, source standing on the base of the character of Telemachus. Tennyson’s innovative introduction of this character has, as a matter of fact, strong analogies with Les aventures di Télémaque written by F. de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon (1699).
L'eroe vittoriano e i suoi modelli: l' "Ulisse" di Tennyson.
RIZZARDI, BIANCAMARIA
2005-01-01
Abstract
The critical tradition on Tennyson prefers to see him as a sophisticated and refined elegiac poet who officiates mild Christian wisdom and bland anxieties of religious faith against the spreading scientism. This study of the sources and the models elaborated in Tennyson’s Ulysses (1842) demonstrates the way in which the poet disrupted, through the reshaping of the Homeric tragic hero, the solid system of values standing at the base of the Empire. This essay throws light on the rich intertextual system on which the poem is based. Particular attention is given to classical sources such as the Odyssey (Book XI, ll. 100-37), Sophocles’s Ajax and Philoctetes, Euripide’s Hecuba, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, (13.183), Seneca’s Troades and modern ones, starting with Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (III.iii. from line 150 onwards) and echoes from poets such as Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley. In Tennyson’s poem this complex and elaborated system is welded together with a lacerated Victorian sensibility. Particular attention is also paid to the reflection on the relationship with the past, seen through the prism of Dante’s Inferno (Canto XXVI, lines 90-126). The essay also throws light on a still unacknowledged, or neglected, source standing on the base of the character of Telemachus. Tennyson’s innovative introduction of this character has, as a matter of fact, strong analogies with Les aventures di Télémaque written by F. de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon (1699).I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
