«Uscendo dalle fauci di Mongibello». Il mito di Orfeo nelle poesie di Eugenio Montale

As interesting and charismatic as ever, the mythical figure of Orpheus runs through the Western tradition from its beginnings to contemporary times. As critics have already suggested, important analogies with this myth can also be discerned in the work of Eugenio Montale. On this basis, this paper analyzes how, in his different recollections, Montale poetically works on the myth of Orpheus and modulates its distinctive “mythemes”, adapting them to his own poetic experience. Thus, it will be shown how, analogously to the twentieth-century rewritings of the myth, the poet perceives the experience of detachment from his beloved (with all that it involves) by closely recalling Orpheus, a liminal symbol of the space between death and life that becomes an ontological model intrinsically related to Montale’s poetic mechanism.