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As William Butler Yeats is one of the greatest modern English poet Ireland produced, James Joyce is one of the greatest modern English novelist born in Ireland. Yeats used the legends of Ireland as poetic material and established his own philosophical scheme with the help of his wife George Hyde Lees’s automatic writing.
James Joyce used the legend of the ancient work as a base of his novel’s structure. In Ulysses, he used Homer’s Odyssey as a means of giving unity to the seemingly disorganized modern citizens’s lives. Joyce himself disclosed the scheme of Ulysses and all the chapters corresponded to the episodes in Homer’s Odyssey.
Chapter 4 of Ulysses corresponds to the Calypso episode in Odyssey. Though the Calypso episode lasts 24 days and chapter 4 deals with the accidents happened in only 45 minutes, there are lots of parallels between the two stories. The relationship between Calypso and Odysseus parallels that of Bloom and his wife Molly. What Bloom does in that time parallels what Odysseus does during 24 days.
In conclusion, we can safely say that Joyce adapted the Calypso episode very well to the modern Odysseus, Bloom and his adventure in the modern city, Dublin.