TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/30s/30cats

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 1.6 KB | 37 lines

                                                                                Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats


(November 20, 1939)

  "Old Possum" is a nickname given to Anglophile T. S. Eliot by
Anglophobe Ezra Pound. Source of the nickname was an old compact
by which Poet Pound undertook to attack British literary
lethargy from afar (i.e., Rapallo, Italy), while Poet Eliot
played possum in the enemy camp. Lying low in a high place.
Eliot never included in his published works various light verses
about cats which his friends and a few children received from
time to time, typewritten and unsigned. The present collection
marks, among other things, Eliot's first public acknowledgment
of possumhood.

  As a literary curiosity, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
rates high. The verses, which show a perfect skill, are
profoundly Anglican, closer in spirit and allusion to Edward
Lear and Lewis Carroll than to any U.S. humor. In some of them
Eliot goes kittenish in a big way, recalling that suspect,
sissified element in Lear and Carroll which sets U.S. teeth on
edge. Yet latent in other of Possum's poems is enough ferocious
fancy and parody to knock the spots off most cat books and most
child verses. Certainly moppets who can take A.A. Milne will
take Possum and like him, for, e.g., the disreputable cat
character whose saga begins:

  Growltiger was a Brave Cat, who lived     upon a barge;   In
fact he was the roughest cat that ever     roamed at large.
From Gravesend up to Oxford he pursued his evil aims,
Rejoicing in his title of "the Terror of the Thames."


*Eliot became a naturalized British subject in 1927.