大象传媒

Poet Daljit Nagra revisits the 大象传媒's radio poetry archive selecting Tennyson鈥檚 Ulysses Revisited.

Alfred Tennyson's much-loved and frequently anthologised poem, Ulysses has always been a favourite of the award-winning poet Sean O'Brien, but he has never fully analysed why.

The poem starts with the Greek hero on the shores of Ithaca, justifying his reasons for leaving his faithful wife Penelope once more, to set off and travel again. It ends with the famously rousing lines "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield".

2009 marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Tennyson and Sean O'Brien set out on his own journey to learn more about the poem and its enduring appeal.

He hears from Homer scholar Oliver Taplin and Dante scholar Martin McLaughlin about Tennyson's sources for the poem and its surprisingly ambiguous hero, and then learns from Victorian experts Seamus Perry, Robert Douglas Fairhurst and Linda Hughes about the tragedy in Tennyson's young life that led him to write this poem about an old man when he himself was just 24.

This is a poem about bereavement and death but, as the poet Vicki Feaver explains, it is also about the personal struggle in each of us between comfort and adventure, between the familiar and the unknown, between accepting life as it is and striving ever onward.

Anton Lesser provides a powerful new reading of Ulysses.

Produced by Beaty Rubens

First broadcast on 大象传媒 Radio 4 in 2009.

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