What Old Possums Of Practical Cats Actually Is
T.S. Eliot published a thin volume of light verse about cats in 1939, and that's essentially the whole thing. Twenty-six poems, each about a different cat, written for children but picked up decades later by Andrew Lloyd Webber, who turned it into a musical that ran for eighteen years in the West End and made most people associate the poems with sequined leotards and dramatic hairpieces rather than the dry, slightly absurd verse Eliot actually wrote. The poems predate his famous serious work, The Waste Land, by about a decade, which is why they sound completely different from anything else he published after. They're simple on purpose. Nonsense-rhyme simple, more or less. I used to look for this stuff when I was tracking down primary sources for a literature seminar back in the late 2000s. The problem wasn't finding it. The problem was figuring out what edition you were actually getting, because there are dozens. Some are heavily illustrated. Some are bare-bones. The 1939 original has a specific tone that gets flattened out when illustrators add too much charm to the darker poems like Macavity or Growltiger's Last Stand.
Getting A Copy Of Old Possums Of Practical Cats
The book is in the public domain in most of the world now. Eliot died in 1965, so copyright has expired everywhere except the United States, where the 1939 publication date means it won't enter the public domain there until 2035. That's the main reason you still see it for sale commercially instead of floating around as a free PDF on every archive site. In the UK, Canada, Australia, and the EU, you can download clean text copies from Project Gutenberg or similar repositories without hunting through commercial retailers. The standard edition runs about 48 pages and costs between eight and fifteen dollars at any bookstore, though the illustrated ones go for more. If you're reading this for the poetry itself rather than preparing for a performance, skip the deluxe illustrated editions. They add visual commentary that wasn't in Eliot's text and subtly shift how you hear the rhythm. Get the plain text version, preferably the Faber and Faber edition if you want something authoritative, or a public-domain scan if you want to save money.
How To Read It Properly
The poems aren't meant to be read as a unified narrative. They're character sketches in verse. Each one paints a single cat, and the collection works like a catalog. The difficulty most people have with it is treating it like it needs to hang together cohesively. It doesn't. Reading it straight through like a novel will make you feel like something's missing because you're expecting a plot that Eliot never intended to write. The tricky part is the meter. Several of the poems use anapestic tetrameter, which sounds cheerful and bouncy but can collapse completely if you rush through the caesuras. "Gus: The Theatre Cat" has lines that look straightforward on paper but trip up anyone who's never worked with that rhythm before. The fourth foot is almost always the pivot point where the line breaks, and if you don't land it, the whole thing flattens into something that sounds like a nursery rhyme that gave up halfway through. I remember being stuck on "The Naming Of Cats" for a class discussion once. The poem claims that every cat needs three distinct names, and a student in the back of the room said this proved the poem was just nonsense, which it sort of is but also sort of isn't. The three-name system isn't arbitrary. The first is the everyday name any family uses. The second is the dignified name the cat insists on. The third is the secret, profound name known only to the cat itself. Eliot is building a small ontology of identity here, not just making up funny rules. The deeper poems in the collection, especially "Rum Tuggle Cat" and "Mungojerry and Rumpletiltie," actually deal with marginalization and survival in pretty clear terms. Don't dismiss them because they rhyme too neatly.
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What Beginners Miss
The biggest blind spot is assuming the poems are simply children's verses. Eliot was deliberately writing for his children and godchildren at the time, yes, but he was also experimenting with voice and form in a way that wouldn't fully resolve until he started writing the Four Quartets. The dry wit, the precise diction, the way he lets the cat do the talking instead of narrating over them — those are techniques he refined throughout his career. The poems are short, but they're dense for what they are. Another thing people overlook is the musical potential in the text itself. The lyrics Webber pulled from for the stage show came entirely from these poems, and the fact that they work so well as sung lyrics is deliberate. Eliot was aware of poetic rhythm as performance material. "Jellicle Songs" and "The Song of the Jellicles" weren't written as stage numbers. They were poems about a cat tribe, and the musical adaptation just followed the text where it was already heading. If you're studying the source material for any reason, compare the original stanzas to the song versions. The differences in line breaks and emphasis tell you a lot about what the poet was actually doing.
When Old Possums Of Practical Cats Doesn't Work For You
It won't work if you're looking for deep literary criticism or sustained thematic development. It's a pamphlet, not a treatise. If your goal is to understand Eliot's mature philosophy, go straight to Four Quartets and skip this entirely. The connection between the two bodies of work is real but too thin to serve as a bridge for serious study. You'll waste time drawing parallels that Eliot himself probably never intended. The poems also don't age perfectly in a few spots. The class attitudes embedded in some of the characterizations — the aristocratic cats versus the street cats versus the working-class pets — reflect a specific British social structure that hasn't carried much force in a hundred years. Readers outside that tradition may find certain poems feel arbitrary rather than observed. That's a fair critique. The collection has genuine merit but it's not universal in scope, and acknowledging that keeps you from overrating it. For most people who pick it up, it works fine as a short, sharp collection of character studies. Read it once through in an evening. Come back to the poems you liked and read them aloud slowly, marking the anapestic feet. The rest will take care of itself.
