This chapter examines the Homeric elements in Eliot and Pound’s common project to locate the chthonic origins and past incarnations of language buried in the poetic self. It finds in Eliot’s poetry and prose the gradual revelation of a concept of poetic creation with surprising affinities to the ‘Romantic Imagination’, involving a radical exercise in humility, passivity and uncertainty. The chapter uses the journey of Odysseus into the underworld to speak with the dead as a point of departure for considering the outward ripples of this encounter, via Pound, into the later Quartets. In his later poems Eliot’s spectres become literary patriarchs: classical, Shakespearean, and more immediately, Yeats and Pound. They are entwined with the poet’s conscious self in a dynamic of ambivalent exchange, a reciprocal possession. The insights of this chapter give a particularised form and power to Eliot’s reluctantly Arnoldian concern with the ‘buried life’. This form is given its clearest expression in ‘East Coker’ and ‘The Dry Salvages’. The chapter culminates with a reading of the ghostly encounter of ‘Little Gidding’ in relation to Pound’s imagining of ‘The Return’ (1912).