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.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Eliot (1915)
One of Eliot’s most anthologized poems, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is a modernist masterpiece. The poem is about a lonely, old man who seeks to ask an ambiguous question to an unnamed woman. While there are many interpretations of “Prufrock,” the reason this poem relates to “The Song of the Jellicles” is that it contains many of the same rhythmic movements and structures. “Prufrock” is also an easier Eliot modernist poem to read than poems like “The Waste Land,” so if a reader wishes to see what Eliot’s mature poetry looks like, this poem is a good one with which to start.
"The Jellicle Ball" by Andrew Lloyd Webber (1981)
While Cats does not include “The Song of the Jellicles,” “The Jellicle Ball” is a close adaptation. This song opens the play, and it introduces the audience to many of the main cat characters. The song also serves as a good introduction to the play. If the song does not conjure the kind of images in the reader’s mind that Eliot intended, the play offers visuals to accompany the words. With these visuals, the reader can get a good sense of the kind of world Eliot created.
Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot (1939)
To fully grasp Eliot’s cat world, it is best to read the entire collection of cat poems. In the book, Eliot introduces a number of cats and establishes the world and society of the cats seen in “The Song of the Jellicles.” The book concludes with a thematic message that allows the reader to infer that the cats in the book are representative of people. There are also recordings of Eliot reading these poems on YouTube.
Further Literary Resources
"Imperial Names for “Practical Cats”: Establishing a Distinctly British Pride in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats" by Dorothy Dodge Robbins (2013)
In this article, Dodge Robbins provides literary and historical interpretations of the names of the various cats in Eliot’s world. She traces most of the names to either London influences or Anglican influences, both of which were heavy affects in Eliot’s life. Dodge Robbins makes the case that Eliot’s cat poems are worth literary scholarship despite previous objections.
"Eliot’s Cats Come out Tonight" by Janet Karsten Larson (1982)
In this review of the opening of Cats, Karsten Larson critiques the play and poems that inspired it. She intends to draw the reader’s attention to the spiritual aspects of the material, arguing that the cat poems and the play both exemplify Eliot’s belief in the “drumbeat of the world”—a belief that argued for art’s importance in connecting people through word, rhythm, and common experience.
T. S. Eliot: Children’s Poet? by Bridget Carlson (2015)
Carlson’s graduate thesis provides background information about Eliot, about his cat poems and their composition, and about the literary and artistic value of his children’s verse. Carlson argues that scholars should treat the poems seriously, and she makes this argument by linking the poems to other aspects of modernism and by showing the various historical and literary allusions present in the poems.
Listen to Poem
While Eliot was not a singer, he did recordings of his cat poems while experimenting with the poems for possible stage adaptations. While Eliot reads the poem the way he thinks it should be sung, the actual songs based on his poems sound much different. When Andrew Lloyd Webber set the poems to music, he had a difficult time structuring them, but the final product ended up much different than what Eliot imagined. Still, to get a good sense of the original rhythm of the poem, this reading does well.
Related Titles
By T. S. Eliot
