This essay begins with a problem of reception, as the writer explains the last lines of Ulysses being
written in most of the English-speaking world’s schools, There is a powerful correlation between the
teachings of ulyses and an institutional need to uphold, if not of the presitege of England, then English
literature. There is evidence that Ulysses acquired its place in tennyson’s canon much later than it’s
conception, and because of the English literature becoming a pedagogical discipline, which caused
English to be a world language.
Though there was largely favorable reviews of the 1842 poems where Ulysses first appeard, rarely
would any critic talk about Ulysses,two exceptions single the poem out specifically, one by john sterling
whom despite his admiration for it,complains about it’s failure to take up the topic of European
expansionism, another complains of other critic’s lack of attention to Ulysses.
A way to see the reception to Ulysses is to examine it’s republication’s history, finding that it was not
selected for anthologies for general public, while many other poems of the time did. An exception is
being selected by emerson for intellectual poems section in pamassus.Though, Ulysses is present in
anthologies for teaching rather than pleasure.
With this, you can conclude that ulysees’s popularity among tennyson’s poem is because of historical
developments that came much farther than it’s original writing, these devlopments are the English
poetry becoming a subject of formal instruction, and the notion of the English culture being a system of
values, producible outside of England.
Ulysses is a poem that expresses hatred towards his own country, so this poem being a means of
maintaining relations between English-settler states and England itself is odd.
Ulysses considers himself of a higher being intellectually, and perhaps even culturally, and considers
his people a savage race that he has to put laws upon, like a colonial administrator giving his spot to
someone else while he comes back to his home.
Issue is, Ulysses is already home, and his eagerness to leave could be considered the actions of a man
with an adventurous spirit, wanting to leave his quiet life one more time.
A clear position about the imperialist or colonialist ideologies cant be reasoned out within the poem,
which is quite a contrast to other writings of Tennyson whom is on the side of imperialist policies.
Tennyson also found great interest in john seeley’s “the expansion of England” which calls for the
English becoming a federation, being inspired from the united states, he sent a copy of this to
Gladstone,which was returned with hesitation on his part.
An interesting note, is that to call ulysse’s poem in 1833 an imperialist text , is strange because at the
time many parts of the world were in a single colony or group,and the level of imperialism that was
noticeable began in the second half of the century, which means Ulysses as an imperial text happened
as a prologue of imperialism.
This becomes a paradox, Ulysses is spoken to be a prologue to imperialism, yet imperialism hadn’t
existed at the time, and on the other side, it could be seen as a nostalgic view on the colonialist
pedagogy. This paradox is oddly expressed as a trope that’s central to tennyson’s poetics, like Ulysses
which is the interchange of beginning and endings, new and old.
The poem is set at evening, which is also the evening of ulysses’s life, and yet, is the beginning of
ulysse’s new journey, in a way a question that can be asked is if Ulysses and his companions are old, or
is the world he’s in old and he seeks to venture to a brave new one? And is Ulysses who seeks a new
world, find himself in an old world?
As the british imperialism’s ideology developed over the 19th century,This thematics of heliotrope,
which is tropes about the location of the sun and the day to night cycle, came to structure it, and this
“greater Britain” needed to articulate colonials as new English people, and those with a new kind of
English, and keep the prestiege of the original culture intact as old ideologies, the production of these
subjects became the task of the colonialist pedagory.
Ulysses absolutely contributed to this, though a clear response to the poem is very unlikely, because
while Ulysses was about embarking on a new journey, it also points that these kinds of journeys are not
doable anymore, and to add, we also know that the ideologies that many of the imperialist supports
had, came after this poem.
“Ulysses”’s makes people of this ideology nostalgic, even though it came before it, this is problematic,
either we can deny the connection of this story to the imperialistic ideology that came after, or we could
say it was the reason it came into being, both of these are too extreme.
We can refer to louis althuser’s essay, in which he proposes that ideology is eternal and without history,
and of how the subject could bring about an ideology who’s not within the historical time of the
ideology itself.
Ulysses says” I am become a name” which is the reason why he’s cohesive and recognizable in the
discourse he’s been given, and this depends on his name, in context of other discources, another
meaning in the trope of new and old in Ulysses can be found here, because even when something new is
found within the texts, it’s always been there.
Finally, the effective time of this textuality, is the time of tennyson’s text crossing between the discourse
of a colonialist pedagogy. These moments are always compromised after it happens, and they
happensas an interpretative act, which means they cannot be pointed towards any specific moment of
an experience or time. and that these crossings in “Ulysses” are ideological in nature, and that they are
an essential force for the ideology.