Mr. Mistoffelees

The two genres that greatly influenced Eliot’s cat-poems were traditional English nursery rhymes and the Victorian-era nonsense-verse of writers like Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. Nursery rhymes such as “Three Blind Mice” and “Mary Had a Little Lamb” use accessible rhythms and simple vocabulary to entertain and instruct children. Most popular English nursery rhymes were collected between the 17th and 19th centuries and were intended as lullabies for children. The songs often had religious and political subtexts, such as the Christian meaning of “Mary Had a Little Lamb”—an allusion to the Virgin Mary and her child Christ the lamb. From these rhymes, Eliot borrows an easy, conversational style and a sing-song quality. In the cat-poems, he parodies the form as well, because unlike some nursery rhymes, his poems are not meant to be instructional.

The “nonsense” verse and literature of Carroll and Lear was a more interesting influence on Eliot’s odes to felines. Nonsense verse challenges the notion that poetry—or prose—should have hidden or allegorical meanings; in fact, it challenges the notion of meaning in writing altogether. The pleasures of literary nonsense verse lie in its whimsy, inventiveness, and sheer capacity for wonder. Anything can happen in such a poem, like in Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat” (1871), where an owl and a pussycat travel to sea in a pea green boat to be married by a turkey. In Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, the cats have anthropomorphized characteristics, are magicians and outlaws, and possess wonderfully inventive names. The difference between Carroll and Lear’s outlandish imagination and Eliot’s inventiveness is that Eliot’s cats are all rooted in reality; their magic lies in the eyes of the beholder. Thus, Eliot puts his own stamp on the Victorian form. Critics find Eliot’s inspiration in the Victorians ironic, since in his famous essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), Eliot claimed most English literature after the 17th century lacked soul.

Eliot’s delight in cats and children’s verse can also be read in the context of his era. During the 1930s, trouble had been steadily brewing in Europe and in 1939, the clouds of World War II were on the horizon. In fact, many critics of the time considered Eliot’s publication of nonsense verse in the year the WWII erupted to be both insensitive and offensive. It can be argued, however, that the light verse was the poet’s attempt to seek refuge from the political turmoil of his times.