Opening paragraphs......................

There was no aged dog to welcome him, and no murderous suitors for him to deceive, but E. E. Cummings was a nervous wreck.  Professor John H. Finley Jr., introducing Cummings at Memorial Hall, kept saying that Cummings's return to Harvard after more than thirty years was like Odysseus' return to Ithaca, but the fifty-eight-year-old Cummings, held together by a neck-to-hip corset that he called "the Iron Maiden," and attended by his beautiful, homesick common-law wife, did not feel at all victorious or Homeric.
-Susan Cheever,   e. e. cummings:  a life

Ed. Note:  For the curious, a version of Odysseus' return to Ithaca is here