The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review. – Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) is, at first glance, an outlier in the poet’s oeuvre. The same man who penned the solemn musings of The Waste Land and the spiritual interrogations of Four Quartets here turns his attention to a whimsical collection of feline character sketches, written in lively, metered verse. Yet, upon closer inspection, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats is far more than a playful diversion—it is a work that reveals Eliot’s dexterity with language, his mastery of persona, and his ability to blend high modernist techniques with traditional poetic forms.

The Duality of the Poet: High Modernist and Playful Raconteur

Eliot, often perceived as an austere intellectual, surprises his readers by indulging in light-hearted verse that retains the rhythmic precision and lexical ingenuity of his more serious poetry. Each cat introduced in the book—whether the cunning Macavity, the theatrical Gus, or the mischievous Rum Tum Tugger—is an intricately constructed persona, revealing Eliot’s fascination with the performative nature of identity. This echoes his earlier poetic works, where the fragmented voices in The Waste Land and the dramatic monologues in Prufrock and Other Observations expose the instability of the self.

Beneath the book’s playful surface, one detects an undercurrent of social satire. Many of the feline protagonists resemble human archetypes: the criminal mastermind (Macavity), the vain and fickle celebrity (Bustopher Jones), the washed-up actor (Gus the Theatre Cat), and the worker trapped in a Sisyphean loop (Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat). Eliot, with his characteristic irony, critiques the absurdity of social pretensions through the lens of anthropomorphized felines, much in the same way George Orwell’s Animal Farm later used animals to critique political structures.

Form and Structure: Tradition and Experimentation

Eliot’s use of meter and rhyme in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats reveals his indebtedness to the English lyrical tradition. The singsong quality of anapestic and dactylic rhythms evokes the nursery rhymes of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, yet the precision of Eliot’s word choice and the interplay of sound and sense align him with the modernist movement. Even in the ostensibly simple lines of Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer, there is a linguistic playfulness that mirrors the structural experimentation found in his major works.

Moreover, Eliot’s cats—each with a distinct voice—display his theatrical instincts. The poems are structured like miniature dramatic monologues, recalling Robert Browning’s influence on Eliot’s early poetry. The characters exist in a world both surreal and tangible, reinforcing the idea that poetry is as much about performance as it is about meaning.

Legacy and Influence: From Verse to Stage

The book’s afterlife, culminating in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats (1981), speaks to its enduring cultural resonance. While the musical takes liberties with Eliot’s text, it preserves the poet’s core preoccupation with memory, identity, and the passage of time—themes that surface even in a book of verse about whimsical cats.

Ultimately, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats is a testament to Eliot’s range as a poet. It reminds us that even the most serious of modernists had a sense of humor, an ear for musicality, and an appreciation for the absurdities of human—and feline—behavior. Beneath its playfulness lies an astute commentary on the human condition, disguised in whiskers and tails.

A Scholar’s Delight Disguised as Children’s Verse

While often categorized as a children’s book, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats reveals depths that invite scholarly interrogation. It is a work that both upholds and subverts literary traditions, balancing humor with social critique and formal discipline with exuberant linguistic play. Whether read as light-hearted verse or as a subtle exercise in poetic craft, Eliot’s feline anthology is a delightful yet intellectually engaging contribution to 20th-century literature.