Wanderers’ Tales: Ulysses

This is a poem. Many people these days appear to suffer poetophobia, or do not have the patience to read poems; others seem to believe that poems are a form exclusively reserved for the trite thoughts of adolescents. But it would be a great shame to disregard so many works of genius for such foolish reasons. So please read Ulysses; read it slowly, if at first it seems to be written in an unfamiliar tongue.

And make sure to utterly disregard the lunatic scholars who now claim that, contrary to all rhyme and reason, the poem is ironic. They are the saddest of Urizen’s minions, taking themselves so seriously that they cannot believe any great art to be serious. They are the same people who have convinced themselves that The Turn of the Screw cannot be a ghost story.

As for Ulysses himself, I once met him on the Isle of the Sun, and he seemed rather pleased with this poem.

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