The functions of literary allusions in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot

Abstract

This article deals with the functions of literary allusions in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot. The material of the study is the book of verses included into the annotated anthology The Poems of T. S. Eliot. Vol. 2. Practical Cats and Further Verses (2015) compiled and edited by the leading contemporary Eliot scholars, British-American researcher Sir Christopher Ricks and renowned British critic and publisher Jim McCue. In this paper, the author considers different types of allusions in T. S. Eliot’s poems and determine their specificity. This has required using cultural historical approach and methods of literary structural analyses. The purpose of the study is to confirm that the intertextuality of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats is represented by a new type of allusiveness, which is an important element of modernist aesthetics. Intertextuality in T. S. Eliot’s book of verses is a complex system of connections between texts and phenomena of various cultural and historical layers. Allusions change the status of the texts of the book, make them heterogeneous and help to expand their figurative structure. A characteristic feature of Eliot’s modernist allusion is its multi-composition where one and the same image can be correlated to various literary texts and cultural eras. The intertextuality of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats proves that these verses were addressed for an adult audience as well, since only an intellectually “savvy” reader familiar with a wide range of literature and art works, various cultural traditions and historical eras is able to understand the different textual levels and the artistic intentions of the poet.