Victorians are separating the secular from the spiritual, which plunges them into a state of crisis. Poetry, then, is the new church of the Victorian Age and its hero the poet. Yet does this new hero have an audience, a following? Alfred Lord Tennyson, poet of the 19th Century, suggests that Carlyle's Hero as Poet does not have an audience and the Victorian people fail to recognize any manner of hero. The Hero as Poet exists yet his efforts are unnoticed and unappreciated. Tennyson's exploration of Carlyle's Hero as Poet and its relevance in Victorian society is best typified in his poems Ulysses and The Lady of Shalott. In these works, the poet is seen as no less heroic than in Carlyle's illustration, nor the need for them in Victorian society undermined. Instead, they are reclassified as a tragic hero, as the integration of the Hero as Poet into society, or their attempts for recognition, go tragically unnoticed.It is interesting to see Tennyson's reinvention of the quintessential classic Greco-Roman hero, Ulysses. The poem itself is a metaphor for the crisis taking place in Victorian society. The island of Ithaca can be meant for England. Ulysses, an archetypal hero of yore, whose reputation grew from adventures and conquests and deeds done in battle returns to Ithaca unrecognized as a hero to his people, who forget him, as can be seen in these first lines;It little profits that an idle king,By this still hearth, among these barren crags,Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and doleUnequal laws unto a savage race,That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. (Ulysses, 1-5)If the people of Ithaca represent Victorian society, the references to "hoarding" are parallels to the Victorian obsession with the material, to "sleep", their spiritual dormancy, and to "feed", their hunger for knowledge. They do not recognize the hero. We begin to see the development of Ulysses as a Hero as a Man of Letters. He equates himself with regular men,...
