An Undetected Echo of Tennyson's "Ulysses" in Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass"

Abstract

This discovery article explores the previously unrecognized semantic resonance between the concluding verses of Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem "Ulysses" and Walt Whitman's poem "The Untold Want." The English and American poets were not only contemporaries but also friends who admired each other's work and corresponded over the course of two decades. In pursuing a daring Ulysses-like voyage "to seek and find," Whitman was paying tribute to his fellow poet's questing spirit.