Word: possum
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Poetry: T. S. Eliot's "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" helps us to remember that Mr. Eliot used to exercise a considerable gift for writing light verse. His cats are delightful, and the book is in every way pleasing. His "Family Reunion," published last Spring created the nearest thing to a literary cause celebre that Harvard had seen in years. You can give it to reactionary Anglophile classicists, if you know any. . . . Mark Van Doren's "Collected Poems, 1922-1938" give a good picture of a sensitive and rather mystical mind. Mr. Van Doren's "Shakespeare" cannot...
Publisher John Macrae Sr., longtime president of E. P. Button & Co. (books), shot himself in the upper left arm and chest while hunting 'possum near Greenwich, Va., was hurried to Fauquier County* hospital for a blood transfusion...
...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...
...literary curiosity, Old Possum's cat book 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...