Odysseus' End, Re-written by Dante and Tennyson
The great Florentine poet Dante Alighieri (Inferno, begun 1306: Canto XXVI; read from line 44), and, following him, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (Ulysses: 1833) wrote fascinating endings to the story of Odysseus, which the Odyssey itself leaves open. Their 'new' endings provoke thought on the 'real' character of Odysseus in the Odyssey itself: what happens to the idea of "Return"—and a life focused on it—once we have returned? For the modern Greek poet Constantine Cavafy in Ithaka, the Journey's the thing, and the function of "Ithaca," paradoxically, is simply to give us the Journey.