"UMBRAE: incontri e abbracci."

Modernist poets, in particular T.S. Eliot (in Four Quartets) and Ezra Pound (in The Cantos) take inspiration from classic literature (Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid) to re-create the mythical topos of the “nekya”, the descent in the underworld, the meeting with the spirits of the deceased and the interrogation of a soothsayer (Tiresias and the Cuman Sybil) about the hero’s future. To further enrich this ritual action, another topos is recovered also “via” Dante’s Divine Comedy (Purg. II): that of the embrace with the ghosts of the parents or friends. This is typical of Modernist literature, perfectly emblematizing that “mythical method” formulated by T.S. Eliot in his 1923 review of James Joyce’s Ulysses