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Composition at Somersby

When: 20 October 1833 (traditional; uncertain)
Where: Somersby, Lincolnshire
Part of: Tennyson writes the poem Ulysses

Tennyson completed the poem on 20 October 1833 at Somersby, Lincolnshire, following the death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam.

Tennyson was living in Somersby, Lincolnshire, in cramped quarters with his mother and nine siblings when he heard of Hallam's death on 1 October 1833. He completed the poem on 20 October 1833, though it was not published until 1842 in his second collection of Poems.

Sources

Ulysses (poem) Wikipedia, revision of 2026-10-05

Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.