19 pages • 38 minutes read
T. S. EliotThe Song of the Jellicles
Fiction | Poem | Middle Grade | Published in 1939A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context: The Literary Canon
There is very little literary criticism about Eliot’s cat poems. Even though poems like “The Song of the Jellicles” are not intended for more mature audiences, it is strange to think that a poet like Eliot, who the literary world holds in high regard, would have a large chunk of his work ignored. Poems like “The Waste Land” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” are staples of the literary canon—the term scholars use to describe the loose collection of widely accepted pieces of art critics consider excellent because of their innovation, form, style, content, or historical significance. Eliot is a leading figure within the literary canon, but his cat poems are rarely grouped with his other canonical works.
While Eliot’s cat poems do not necessarily innovate or change the standard children’s poem format, and while they do not offer the kind of blistering social commentary and poetic manipulation his more famous poems use, they are definitely good poems by any objective measure. In “The Song of the Jellicles,” for example, the rhythm has the tightness of a mathematical formula. The rhymes are natural and use unique word combinations. The descriptions of the cats feature effective personification and imagery. And the juxtaposition between the childish images and mature themes is clever.
Nevertheless, the poem is not commonly thought of as canonical—or, at the very least, the poems are not thought of in the same way as Eliot’s other poems. It is up to new readers and scholars to either continue the traditions of the past or to rework them. Critics continue to debate the question of what makes something canonical, and the possibility of new poems being added to the canon is ever-present.
Authorial Context: History of Composition
There isn’t much to say about the historical and social context of “The Song of the Jellicles.” Eliot wrote the poem, along with all his other cat poems, for his grandchildren. The Jellicles began in 1933 as a poetic exercise with which Eliot was playing. The cat poems weren’t even originally meant for publication; instead, Eliot included them in letters then later compiled them into a book.
Despite the relatively simple origin of the cat poems, it is still important to understand Eliot as a writer if a reader wishes to fully understand the poems. Eliot was a modernist poet. The modernist movement was known for many things, but one central aspect of its philosophy was the innovation of form and content. The modernists embraced things like individuality and the alienation of the self from the rest of the world. They also embraced the separation of poetry from traditional forms, and as a result, many modernists wrote in free verse.
Eliot, on the other hand, utilized many of the structures and rules of traditional verse to create a kind of hybrid between free verse modernist poetry and traditional formal poetry. Many of his poems use rhyme and set rhythms, but the content, the point of view, and the tone of Eliot’s poetry match what other modernists were doing.
While “The Song of the Jellicles” does not embrace some of the concerns more serious modernist poems did, it still has traces of Eliot’s modernist influences. Particularly, the speaker and content of the poem are completely detached from Eliot the poet, the poem uses imagistic techniques of exact description, and the poem depicts a scene of contemporary (though personified) life.
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By T. S. Eliot
