preserves this truth like a piece of dried fruit does
its pit or a pod its seeds. Through centuries of
germination and seasons of growth, the original
essence is revised and evolved, given a new
reading in a new context, and pondered all over
again by readers who are countless generations
removed from those early listeners who circled a
fire and heard the even-then ancient history of
their gods. Two themes that repeat in these
mythic stories have to do with heroic resistance
and return.Heroic resistancecan take the form of
the hero’s superhuman yet often futile effort to
rise up against a force greater than the hero. Yet
the hero by definition feels morally obliged to
undertake perilous and doomed effort.Returnis
often enacted by the hero’s journey back home,
older and wiser, laden with lessons learned and a
message for his native community. Alfred, Lord
Tennyson (1809–1892) in his dramatic mono-
logue ‘‘Ulysses,’’ Jean Anouilh (1910–1987), in
his tragedyAntigone, and Joseph Brodsky in his
‘‘Odysseus to Telemachus’’ use mythic stories and
their themes and illustrate in different ways and
for their separate purposes Campbell’s statement
about how and why myth is appropriated and
changed.
Tennyson, who became poet laureate of
Great Britain in 1850, knew his Homer, and he
knew his Dante. When he set out in 1833 to write
the dramatic monologue ‘‘Ulysses,’’ Tennyson
borrowed from both of these literary forefathers.
From Homer, Tennyson used Odysseus’s return
to Ithaca, imagining in a fresh way what it would
be like for the returning king to have given
twenty years to military life and exploration
and then return to the ‘‘still hearth’’ and ‘‘aged
wife’’ of an uneventful island life where people
do not even recognize him, much less know him
as the great warrior and explorer he has proven
himself to be. From Dante’sInferno, Tennyson
appropriated a different version, in which Odys-
seus is persuaded not to return to Ithaca but
rather to keep traveling beyond his island home
into the uncharted western seas in search of new
adventures. In Tennyson’s handling, this Odys-
seus recognizes he cannot ‘‘rest from travel’’ and
that he must ‘‘drink / Life to the lees.’’ In an
argument that must have resonated with mid-
nineteenth-century readers in an ever-expanding
British Empire, Tennyson has Ulysses assert that
the quests for new experiences and more knowl-
edge are endless endeavors that ought to fill
one’s life until one dies:
all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untraveled world whose margin
fades
Forever and forever when I move.
Tennyson depicts Ulysses as unwilling to
accept the inactivity of a warm fire and the so-
called golden years in companionship with his
now elderly wife. This mythic hero has been
reshaped in Tennyson’s handling into a man who
recognizes that he cannot rest on his laurels and
now take on the (to him humiliatingly) petty tasks
of heading an island government. Moreover, this
Ulysses recognizes that, in his absence, his son,
Telemachus, has become an adult and is quite
suited to handle such local issues of business and
governance. Telemachus can have that job, for
Ulysses is committed to seeking new horizons,
literally and figuratively, until he dies. This king
sails off at sunset (literally late in the day and
figuratively late in his life), without as much as a
hug good-bye for his wife or son. To its contem-
porary readers, the poem may have sounded a
sincere clarion call for the British to continue
their expansionist policies, spreading their enlight-
enment and paternalism across what was to them
a benighted globe. For the poet privately, the
poem had another meaning: Tennyson is reported
(in a footnote to the Norton edition) to have said
that his poem ‘‘expressed his own ‘need of going
forward and braving the struggle of life’ after the
death of Hallam.’’ (Arthur Hallam was Tenny-
son’s beloved friend and was engaged to the
poet’s sister; tragically, Hallam died from a stroke
at the age of twenty-two.) So for Tennyson, the
fusion of two borrowed parts of the myth about
Ulysses was meaningful, both in a public and in a
private way.
Little over one hundred years later, in 1942,
Jean Anouilh (1910–1987) was prompted to
write an adaptation of Sophocles’sAntigone,
the third in a trilogy of plays that together tell
the ancient story of Oedipus, his rise and fall and
the aftermath concerning his sons and hisCLASSICAL MYTHS HAVE EVOLVED OVER
THE CENTURIES, MORPHING LIKE CLAY IN THE
HANDS OF GENERATIONS OF ARTISTS, WHO
RE-CREATE THEM AT A NEW TIME AND PLACE.’’Odysseus to Telemachus