Ritorni danteschi e rielaborazione delle tre cantiche in T. S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Ezra Pound. Semplice nostalgia o straordinaria modernità del Sommo Poeta?

By analyzing Dantean echoes in English Modernist literature, this paper aims at focusing on the different reinterpretations given by T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett and Ezra Pound on the three canticles of the Divine Comedy. This excursus inevitably suggests the immortal character of Dante’s masterpiece in conveying, with vivid visual images, in-depth feeling analyses of individuals and society as well, capable of going beyond time and place. In this regard, while in Eliot’s poems allusions to Dante’s Inferno have the purpose of promoting a spiritual rebirth, in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot the purgatorial dimension becomes the perfect stage to portray the absurdity of life in the twentieth Century. Finally, in Pound’s masterpiece, The Cantos, the ultimate dimension of joy, i.e. Paradise, appears to be broken and perceivable only through fragments, hence signaling the loss of absolute values in our post-modern society.