(1930s) Old Possum's Book Of Practical Cats

Time Magazine 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.