Book Of Practical Cats Research Articles

The space not beyond: T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) and their musical adaptations as elemental melodrama of an upper-atmospheric limit

ABSTRACT This essay examines T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) and its subsequent musical adaptation, Cats (1981) by Andrew Lloyd Webber, through the lens of elemental melodrama. It begins with Eliot’s envisioned but omitted conclusion, where a poet ascends with Jellicle cats, and explores its revival in the musical’s song ‘Journey to the Heaviside Layer’. This ascent melodramatises the climactic journey to a heaven, an imaginary space beyond Earth’s tangible experiences. The essay contrasts the musical’s alignment of the Heaviside Layer with a ‘heaven’ oriented toward the desires and aspirations of anthropomorphised cats with Joseph Kittinger’s 1960 high-altitude balloon ascent and Maurice Blanchot’s reflections on Yuri Gagarin’s space mission. Both Kittinger’s and Blanchot’s writings reveal the Heaviside Layer as both a real and metaphorical space of death and existential void, contrasting with the musical’s portrayal of it purely in terms of celestial ascent. Drawing on Peter Brooks’s theory of melodrama as a post-sacred mode, the essay highlights how tableau, gesture, heightened emotion and, especially, song in Cats convey a collective yearning for transcendence. Ultimately, it argues that the Heaviside Layer in Cats serves as a zone of elemental melodramatic transcendence. It is in this context that earthly limitations, particularly those relating to embodied differences of race and sex, exist in tension with feline (and, by implication, human) aspirations for an unreachable ‘beyond’.

The Humour-Pathos Link from Late-Victorian Aestheticism

By using Freud’s theory of humour (1927) and his Jokes in their relation to the unconscious (1905), we follow the dominant features of the humour-pathos nexus from the late Victorian to the postmodernist literary decadence, taking in our stride the two peaking twentieth century modernist texts published by T.S. Eliot and James Joyce in 1922 Britain. We begin with Oscar Wilde’s popular The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) in relation to Walter Pater’s less well-known autobiographical novel Marius the Epicurean (1885), showing what relation the latter has with T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses. The modernist genial humour of Eliot’s 1939 Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats is contrasted with Tom Stoppard’s in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) and with the dark humour closer to pathos in The Life and Songs of the Crow (1970) by Ted Hughes.

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

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.

Translating Poetry – An Impossible Task?

Abstract Poetry is often claimed to be untranslatable. More specifically, rendering light verse, i.e. poetic humour in another language poses serious challenges for the translator to encounter. In spite of these alleged obstacles, T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats has been translated and lately retranslated into Hungarian in the form of inventive and jocular texts for children. After summarizing the theoretical aspects of poetry translation and providing a brief overview of Eliot’s collection of poems about cats, the present study aims to approach the English source text by highlighting its foregrounded elements: titles, names, and cultural realia and their Hungarian counterparts in the latest translation by Attila Havasi and Dániel Varró.

«ПОПУЛЯРНАЯ НАУКА О КОШКАХ, НАПИСАННАЯ СТАРЫМ ОПОССУМОМ» Т. С. ЭЛИОТА В КОНТЕКСТЕ ТРАДИЦИИ «NURSERY RHYMES»

This paper presents the results of a comparative study of the collection of poems Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) by T. S. Eliot and the collection of children’s verses Mother Goose Old Nursery Rhymes (published in 1760), compiled and illustrated by A. Rackham (1913). Consisting of 15 poems, and distinguished by its frivolity against the background of other works by Eliot, the cycle Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats has been overlooked by both Russian and foreign researchers for a long time. Recently a surge of interest in this book of verse has been provoked by the release of a feature film Cats (2019) based on the world-famous musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber. This fact as well as the lack of serious academic studies of Eliot’s book of verse has determined the urgency and novelty of this paper. It is also important to show the involvement of this segment of Eliot’s poetry into the English literary tradition. The aim of this research is to identify the influence of Victorian aesthetics of nonsense on the poetry of T. S. Eliot’s cycle. The method of comparative analysis has been chosen as the main research method. Besides, structural-semantic and linguistic-cultural methods have been used. In understanding and interpreting the term “tradition” the author relies on Eliot’s aesthetics, in which this concept is central. The terminological unit “nursery rhymes” is used in its original traditional meaning since its historical and cultural background disappears in any Russian translation or scholarly interpretation. In the course of work, certain features of nursery rhymes have been identified in the poetic texts by the great Modernist. The study of the specificity of this genre (the playful atmosphere of the text, the special rhythms and forms of coding historical events, animalistic perspectives, the use of various repetitions and imitations, the creation of author’s occasionalisms and unusual names of characters, etc.) confirms strong influence of the tradition of English nursery rhymes on T. S. Eliot’s works.

T. S. ELIOT’S “OLD POSSUM’S BOOK OF PRACTICAL CATS” IN THE CONTEXT OF “NURSERY RHYMES” TRADITION

This paper presents the results of a comparative study of the collection of poems Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) by T. S. Eliot and the collection of children’s verses Mother Goose Old Nursery Rhymes (published in 1760), compiled and illustrated by A. Rackham (1913). Consisting of 15 poems, and distinguished by its frivolity against the background of other works by Eliot, the cycle Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats has been overlooked by both Russian and foreign researchers for a long time. Recently a surge of interest in this book of verse has been provoked by the release of a feature film Cats (2019) based on the world-famous musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber. This fact as well as the lack of serious academic studies of Eliot’s book of verse has determined the urgency and novelty of this paper. It is also important to show the involvement of this segment of Eliot’s poetry into the English literary tradition. The aim of this research is to identify the influence of Victorian aesthetics of nonsense on the poetry of T. S. Eliot’s cycle. The method of comparative analysis has been chosen as the main research method. Besides, structural-semantic and linguistic-cultural methods have been used. In understanding and interpreting the term “tradition” the author relies on Eliot’s aesthetics, in which this concept is central. The terminological unit “nursery rhymes” is used in its original traditional meaning since its historical and cultural background disappears in any Russian translation or scholarly interpretation. In the course of work, certain features of nursery rhymes have been identified in the poetic texts by the great Modernist. The study of the specificity of this genre (the playful atmosphere of the text, the special rhythms and forms of coding historical events, animalistic perspectives, the use of various repetitions and imitations, the creation of author’s occasionalisms and unusual names of characters, etc.) confirms strong influence of the tradition of English nursery rhymes on T. S. Eliot’s works.

LITERARY FELINOPHILIA AND ANIMALISTIC PERSPECTIVES OF MODERNITY (T. GAUTIER, J. JOYCE, T. S. ELIOT)

Each literary era is characterized by certain models of literary animalism with their own semantic accents and symbolism, types of communication “man — animal”, genre preferences. The article examines the features of literary felinistics of the Art Nouveau era, identifies the cultural and social causes of artistic felinophilia. As a material for the study there were three texts written in the period from 1869 to 1939, considered both in the wide cultural context of the modern era, and within the boundaries of their time (modern): “Ménagerie intime”, 1869 by Gaultier T., “The Cats of Copenhagen’’ (1936) by Joyce J. and “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” (1939) by Eliot T. S. In the course of our research, we relied on both historical and literary works devoted to the analysis of specific animalistic images, works of a culturological nature, and also turned to the experience of structuralist studies and the ideas of new posthumanistic knowledge (Human-Animal Studies). The animalistic texts of Gauthier — Joyce — Eliot unite not only the acting cat characters, but also certain artistic perspectives, similar types of human-animal relationships, social and cultural contexts in which their heroes are represented. The feline characters of Gauthier-Joyce-Eliot have much in common: they are anthropomorphic inhabitants of the urban space of the industrial era, leading an appropriate lifestyle and possessing qualities inherent in the middle class. Gautier, Joyce, Eliot’s cats have a bright personality, extraordinary abilities, a lively mind, a rich emotional world, they live according to the laws of human society. They are attractive, intelligent, vital, civilized individuals with unique, eccentric characters (humors).

Desire and Salvation in the Musical Cats : Focusing on T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats

Desire and Salvation in the Musical Cats : Focusing on T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats

Stylistic Diversity in Creation of the Poetics of a Literary Work for Children (Based on T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats)

The article represents the results of stylistic and literary critical analysis of T.S. Eliot's poems selected from Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939). There was shown that the alternation of speech elements had conditioned the special generic palette of the verses, the variety of heir perception by different aged readers, and thus the book could evoke the new wave of interest to animalism in literature.

Imperial Names for ‘Practical Cats’: Establishing a Distinctly British Pride in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats

AbstractT. S. Eliot provides three categories — the familial, the particular, and the secretive — to delineate the naming of cats in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats; however, the poet’s categories fail to explain completely his onomastic decisions. Instead, Eliot’s naming process reflects the Anglophile’s acquired British tastes. London, a city of Anglican churches and secular theatres, is home to Eliot’s fictional cats and an influence upon many of his name choices. Literary sources, in particular British Nonsense poets, provide additional inspiration for the 54 cat names mentioned in Eliot’s volume.

T. S. Eliot's Autobiographical Cats

T. S. Eliot's Autobiographical Cats Henry Hart (bio) T.S. Eliot worried about how readers would react to the book he originally planned to call Mr. Eliot's Book of Pollicle Dogs and Jellicle Cats as Recited to Him by the Man in White Spats. After Faber & Faber announced a 1936 publication date, he considered demoting "the Man in White Spats"—a character based on his close friend and flatmate John Hayward—from his position as "reciter." He also considered scrapping the balloon flight that was supposed to end the book with poet, narrator, dogs, and cats ascending "Up up up past the Russell Hotel, / Up up up to the Heaviside Layer." He had ended The Waste Land with a similar chant to transcendence, repeating the word shantih three times to emphasize his hope for "the peace that passeth understanding," and in a few years he would conclude Four Quartets with another image of blissful transcendence, declaring: "All manner of things shall be well / when the tongues of flame are in-folded / Into the crowned knot of fire / And the fire and the rose are one." Even though he wrote his cat poems for his godchildren and the children of friends (Tom Faber, Alison Tandy, Susan Wolcott, Susanna Morley), he resisted the sort of uplifting celebratory end that typified generic comedy, sentimental fiction, and children's literature. Pondering his narrative options, Eliot delayed publication of his cat poems for three years, finally releasing them under the shorter title Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats on October 5, 1939. He featured the man in "white spats" in a poem entitled "Bustopher Jones: the Cat About Town," which pokes fun at a dandyish glutton who frequents London's fashionable clubs in "impeccable" attire. During the book's slow gestation he decided to abandon his plan to focus on dogs, which had never exerted the same appeal on his imagination as cats. The dogs that did appear had little to recommend them. They were gullible simpletons, lower-class British louts, or heathenish foreigners who disturbed the peace by carousing and brawling in London's streets. Dogs represented what he called in The Idea of a Christian Society (a collection of [End Page 379] lectures published several weeks after his cat poems) the "illiterate and uncritical mob . . . detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and susceptible to mass suggestion." They were heathens in need of enlightenment and discipline from the Christian cats. Eliot may have decided to abandon the culminating balloon ride "Up up up to the Heaviside Layer" (the ionized layer of the atmosphere 50-90 miles above the earth) for the sake of autobiographical and historical realism. The looming crisis in Europe, which he wrote about in essays during the 1930s, called for worldly vigilance rather than sentimental flights, especially when Nazi Germany invaded Poland and Britain declared war on September 1, 1939. On June 10, 1940, fascist Italy joined the war against Britain and France. Eliot did associate dogs with fascist aggressors for personal as well as political reasons. His wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, from whom he had separated in 1933 after years of painful skirmishing, had joined Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists on December 5, 1934. During the years Eliot composed his cat poems (from about 1932 to 1938), the histrionic Vivienne often dressed up in a fascist uniform and aggressively pursued Eliot around London with her feisty Yorkshire terrier, Polly. Having written to his friend Ottoline Morrell in 1933 that he never wanted to see Vivienne again since he regarded her as "morally . . . unpleasant as well as physically indifferent" (as Ronald Schuchard reports), Eliot mustered all his cat-like skill to avoid her. The first time Vivienne successfully tracked down Eliot after their separation in September 1932 was deeply embarrassing to the poet—and it involved her dog. On November 18, 1934, wearing her fascist uniform and carrying Polly in her arms, she confronted Eliot at a Sunday Times book fair on London's Lower Regent Street. The disgruntled Eliot did his best to compose himself and deliver his lecture. According to Vivienne's biographer, Carole Seymour-Jones, Vivienne and her dog virtually chased Eliot off...

The Naming of Genes

With apologies to T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats,‘The Naming of Cats,’from which this is but a small adaptation.

The Hidden Paw

The Hidden Paw, or an account of a cat scratch and its contemplative repercussions, with sincere apologies and thanks to TS Elliot, whose ‘rifed’ and ‘stifed’ lines, rhymes, words and ideas litter the following lines. “Macavity's a Mystery Cat: he's called the Hidden Paw—For he's the master criminal who can defy the Law. He's the baffement of Scotland Yard, the Flying Squad's despair: For when they reach the scene of crime — Macavity's not there!” TS Elliot “Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats”

T. S. Eliot by Craig Raine (review)

YES, 39.1 & 2, 2009 205 T. S. Eliot. By Craig Raine. New York: Oxford University Press. 2006. xxi + 202 pp. ?12.99. isbn: 978-o-53?993-5 Craig Raine's short, insightful, generously spaced book on Eliot appears inanAmerican series entitled 'Lives and Legacies', but it isno critical biography.Aspects of Eliot's life are presented ina fewpages of 'Preface' thatprecede thebook's Introduction, and ina final 'Appendix 3'. The main textofferskeen insightsintoEliot's poetry,with an eleven page chapter on the drama, twenty-one pages on the criticism, and a thirty-page appendix on 'Eliot and Anti-Semitism'. If itsproportions are provocatively odd, then, given that thisbook isfrom theUS imprintofOUP, and sopresumably aimed not least atAmerican students, the tone can be inappropriate: 'We are all of us familiarwith the poem whose real subject is less important than itsrhyme scheme. F.T. Prince's "Soldiers Bathing", for instance.Reading such a poem is likewatching show jumping at Hick stead' (p. 32). There are toomany nods and winks towriters, writings, and assumed cultural co-ordinates tomake thisa book suitable for introducingEliot to, say,first-year students.This is a great pity (and could have been sorted by tough-minded editing), because Raine's study comes closer than most others to communicating on paper the strengthsof a traditional, rather combative Oxford tutorial. The lastwords of Raine's main textare both rhapsodic and donnish: 'Breath taking.Discuss' (p. 147).Repeatedly he offers good one-liners ('TheWaste Land is Eliot's greatest dramatic work', p. 90), telling points about selected details (as when he quotes the sentence of Lucian's ^euxis, which follows thewords Eliot chose as his epigraph to 'Mr.Apollinax'), and finely phrased evaluation: 'overall, Eliot's tart,pitiless, unforgiving irony has none of Laforgue's wry, sprighdy self inculpation' (p. 42). His book is full of intelligence and communicates a strong sense of writerly personality: 'Wewriters frequently inherit our themes from our most admired predecessors' (p. xiv). This poet-critic has a passion for Eliot's poetry, seeing it inmany ways as exemplary. Yet when Raine tells readers Ash-Wednesday 'isEliot's indestructible Das Lied vonderErie' (p. 33), he appears unconcerned that tomany modern readers this statement will mean litde.Raine's book seems the product not least of excited, potentially exciting pedagogy; but there are also pedagogical issues it shirks.The danger is that, however brilliant, this litde volume will be seen as preaching to the converted. I enjoyed it,but I have taught a course on T. S. Eliot for twenty years. Raine's index has no entries for Cats or even Old Possum's Book ofPractical Cats\ nor for Marie Lloyd, Dracula, or music hall. So Eliot too often emerges as a highbrow poet admired by people with donnish tastes and a gift forwaspish put-downs, rather than as a poet of intense emotion, able to fuse nursery rhymes with high culture to incendiary and moving effect ? yet also to create Macavity. Raine relishes Eliot's work, but his taste for intellectual jousting and a desire to exhibit his dauntingly well-stocked mind too often get in theway. This brilliandy opinionated study is at times too show-offy towin many new readers forEliot. Deeply honourable both in theway itdefends its subject, and sometimes in the way itjustly reserves judgement, theAppendix that deals with anti-Semitism is 206Reviews awkwardly appended, while Raine airbrushes out Eliot's rhymes about King Bolo and his big black queen. What Eliot needs now is a sympathetic critical biography that is addressed to the unconverted. Pithy, provocative, donnishly brilliant, Raine's is toomuch an insider's book. University of St Andrews Robert Crawford Metafictionand Metahistory inContemporary Women'sWriting.Edited byAnn Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007. 48.00. xi + 222 pp. isbn: 978-0-230-00504-4. Since the late 1980s,historyhas emerged as an increasinglyprominent theme incontem porarywriting, and historical literature ? a genre once dismissed as escapist pap ? has discovered a new critical and cultural respectability: what was 'then' is very 'now'. Heilmann and Llewellyn's timely collection of essays considers what is specific about how contemporary women writers represent history.Their clear and purposeful intro duction, oudining the aims and...

T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews (review)

Reviewed by: T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews Frank J. Kearful Jewel Spears Brooker , ed., T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xliii + 600 pp. Thomas Stearns Eliot just won't go away. There are in fact two Eliots still on offer, the good avant-garde early Eliot and the bad reactionary later Eliot. Recently, the good avant-garde early Eliot has also become, thanks to Marjorie Perloff's 21st-century Modernism: The "New" Poetics (2002), a founding member of the twenty-first-century avant-garde. Meanwhile, Eliot the proto-fascist and antisemite has not gone away either, and ongoing debate about this Eliot must now take into account Jason Harding's The "Criterion": Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War Britain (2002), which puts issues at stake in previously neglected contexts. Debate about Eliot is nothing new. He has always been controversial, has always provoked vehement put-downs, and his critical reputation among the cognoscenti has undergone radical ups and downs. Through it all, in the popular mind Eliot remains the founder of "modern poetry" as much as Picasso does of "modern art," or James Joyce of the modern novel, or Igor Stravinsky of modern music. Jewel Spears Brooker's new collection enables us to relive battles as they were first fought and to review positions as they were first staked out. One congratulates critics like Conrad Aiken or Edmund Wilson who "got it right" right away. And one can boo the philistines and one-eyed critics who made such fools of themselves. William Carlos Williams, a special case, is a pleasure to read for his downright incorrigible hostility to his fellow poet. Then there are the many conscientious, not merely cautious, critics who in their reviews debate both sides of the case and gain our respect. Although it can pride itself on being "the most comprehensive collection of contemporary reviews of T. S. Eliot's work as it appeared," thus leaving behind it in its dust Michael Grant's T. S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage (1982), Jewel Spears Brooker's six-hundred-page collection remains a "selected" rather than a "complete" edition. What one does not get one is at any rate told of. The checklist of reviews which did not make the cut for the section on The Waste Land runs to thirty-seven items, rendering the twenty-three reviews which are included at least [End Page 197] numerically a minority report. Similar checklists are provided for each of Eliot's separately published volumes, including the plays and prose, making anyone's task easier who might one day seek to break the record by giving us a "complete" edition of the contemporary reviews. It would have to include critical responses to a few brief pamphlets of Eliot's, to his Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, and to late collections of previously published works, but above all longer review essays, notably of Four Quartets, which sometimes ran to more than twenty pages. Then there is the thorny problem of the Empire, and of lands and languages beyond its pale. We are informed that "[w]ith rare exceptions" no reviews emanating from Australia, New Zealand, and Canada are included, while reviews in languages other than English are entirely ignored. On the other hand, an American bias to the edition may annoy some, as it did Frank Kermode writing on the edition in The New York Review of Books. The fact that Brooker's collection appears in the American Critical Archive series naturally foreordains an American slant. Thomas Inge puts it this way in his Series Editor's Preface: "When completed, the American Critical Archives should constitute a comprehensive history of critical practice in America, and in some cases the United Kingdom, as the writers' careers were in progress. The volumes open a window on the patterns and forces that have shaped the history of American writing and the reputations of the writers. These are primary documents in the literary and cultural life of the nation." The awkwardly inserted "and in some cases the United Kingdom" is a bit more expansive than "[w]ith rare exceptions" and grants a certain license to include...

A Book of Practical Cats

A Book of Practical Cats

Eliot's Naming of Cats

AbstractMost of the names of the cat characters in T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats are of the “peculiar, and more dignified” type, rather than everyday names, and depend either on sound or on meaning, occasionally on both. For nonsense names, Eliot was influenced by Edward Lear.

Mr. Eliot's Guide to Quantum Theory

Last year was the centenary of T. S. Eliot, perhaps the most influential of 20th‐century poets writing in English. That Eliot pursued careers in publishing and banking in addition to his literary work is widely known, but many of his readers will be astonished to learn of the discovery last year of manuscripts that suggest he might at one time have been a student of physics. Published here for the first time, the poems are strongly influenced by the quantum theory that was growing vigorously when Eliot was a young man. They exhibit unmistakable echoes of “The Waste Land,” “Four Quartets” and Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. (They also show remarkable physical prescience: Several of the ideas hinted at postdate Eliot's death in 1965.)

Performance in review

Cats, an adaptation of T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. Directed by Cameron Mackintosh. Music by Andrew Lloyd Weber. New London Theatre, Drury Lane, London, 1981. Hanff, Helene. 84 Charing Cross Road. Directed by James Roose‐Evans. Ambassadors Theatre, London, 1981. Welsh, Anna. Yr. Loving Mama, V.R. Directed by David Stuart. McCoy Theatre, Southwestern At Memphis, Memphis, Tennessee, April 8, 1982.

The Sane, the Mad, the Good, the Bad: T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats

The Sane, the Mad, the Good, the Bad:T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats Marion C. Hodge In general, T. S. Eliot's poetry is intellectual, subtle, static, lyrical. Nothing much happens in it. There are few characters, and they do little except think. Prufrock takes a walk, climbs stairs. Gerontion is "an old man in a dry mouth / Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain."1 In The Waste Land, Madame Sosostris tells fortunes, Phlebas the Phoenician drowns, and, at the conclusion, the narrator sits "upon the shore / Fishing . . ." In Ash-Wednesday and Four Quartets, there are no characters at all, no activity; there is only meditation. The most vigorous narratives in Eliot's "serious" work are those concerning the sexual grubbiness of the typist and "the young man carbuncular" in The Waste Land, and that of Sweeney in several short poems. For the most part, then, Eliot's poetry is thought and symbol, state of mind, state of consciousness. His themes are commonly the emotional and moral sterility of modern civilization and the hope for the renewal of an abiding, satisfying faith, a mythology that will order the present chaos and evil. Implicit in these themes is a vision of humanity as vulgar, powerless, and depraved. But when Eliot writes for children, some things are different. In Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats there is much more action, more narrative, little abstraction, no stream of consciousness. There are many characters in these poems, several of whom are criminals, and there is a great deal of violence, although Eliot here is less serious than in his other work: sometimes he is downright playful. But even when writing for children, the moralist in Eliot cannot be suppressed. Just as he is drawn to the symbol in his "serious" poems, he is drawn to the fable in these poems for children. In Prufrock, in The Waste Land, in Four Quartets, he preaches to adults. In Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, he preaches to children (and adults). He dispels any doubts about his intentions, any doubts that the cats he describes are not symbols for human beings, in the concluding poem of the series, "The Ad-dressing of Cats": [End Page 129] You now have learned enough to seeThat Cats are much like you and meAnd other people whom we findPossessed of various types of mind.For some are sane and some are madAnd some are good and some are bad. . . (11. 5-10) Nor is Eliot's vision of mankind's depravity and violence changed. The most obvious theme of these beast fables is the imperfectibility of catkind/mankind. This theme is explored through the many criminals who are main characters, and, except for a few instances, through those cats who are not outlaws but are nevertheless subjects of satire rather than praise. The second important theme of Practical Cats is that of order in a violent, chaotic world. The imperfectibility of mankind is a stated theme in three poems, "The Old Gumbie Cat," "The Rum Tum Tugger," and "Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer." "The Old Gumbie Cat" describes the attitudes and actions of Jennyanydots, a reformer of the "let's be up and doing," "learn a trade and become a productive member of society" school of thought. Part of the Gumbie Cat's nature is to be idle: "All day . . ./ She sits and sits and sits and sits" (11. 3-4), and so she seems to be an idle rich type. During the night she becomes active, and sneaks into the basement, being "deeply concerned with the ways of the mice"(1.9), cockroaches, and beetles who live there. From what are these unsavory characters to be saved by their social and cultural superior? Well, Jennyanydots does not like the mice because "Their behaviour's not good and their manners not nice" (1.10) and because they "will not ever keep quiet" (1. 19). She is disgusted by the cockroaches' "idle and wanton destroyment" (1. 32). Jennyanydots, like many of her ilk, is prone to think in stereotypes. Because the indictment of the mice, cockroaches, and beetles is...