Thomas Stearns Eliot

Whispers of immortality
Gus: the theatre cat
Biography
• Thomas Stearns Eliot, (26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965) was a British
essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic, and "one of the
twentieth century's major poets". He moved from his native United States
to England in 1914 at the age of 25, settling, working, and marrying there.
• Eliot attracted widespread attention for his poem "The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock" (1915), which was seen as a masterpiece of
the Modernist movement. It was followed by some of the best-known
poems in the English language, including The Waste Land (1922), "The
Hollow Men" (1925), "Ash Wednesday" (1930), and Four
Quartets (1943). He was also known for his seven plays,
particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1949).
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, "for his outstanding,
pioneer contribution to present-day poetry".
 Born Thomas Stearns Eliot
26 September 1888
St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.

Died 4 January 1965 (aged 76)

Kensington, London, England

Occupation Poet, dramatist, literary critic, editor

Citizenship American by birth; British from 1927

Education AB in philosophy (Harvard, 1909)

[1]
PhD (cand) in philosophy (Harvard, 1915–16)

Alma mater Harvard University

Merton College, Oxford

Period 1905–1965

Literary movement Modernism

Notable works "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), The Waste
Land (1922), Four Quartets(1943), "Murder in the
Cathedral" (1935)

Notable awards Nobel Prize in Literature (1948), Order of Merit (1948)

GUS- THE THEATRE CAT
• "Gus: The Theatre Cat" is a poem by T. S. Eliot included in Old
Possum's Book of Practical Cats. Known as "The Theatre Cat" due to
his career as an actor, Gus is an old and frail, yet revered, cat, who
"suffers from palsy, which makes his paws shake." His coat is
described as "shabby" and he is "no longer a terror to mice or to
rats."
• Gus, whose full name is Asparagus, is also a character in Andrew
Lloyd Webber's musical adaption of the book, Cats.
• STYLE: IT IS A NARRATIVE POEM WHICH TELLS THE STORY OF GUS, THE
THEATRE CAT
• TITLE: THE TITLE HAS AN OBVIOUS MEANING SINCE IT SPECIFIES the story
will be about theatre cat
• Use of senses: in the poem you can identify the use of sight. The
impressions are neutral. This poem concentrates on a single sense
• Rhythm: the rhythm is a march, it is always the same
• Imagery: in this poem, T S Eliot uses visual imagery “And he once crossed
the stage on the telegraph wire, to rescue a child when a house was on
fire.” Personification is also used in this poem, for a cat cannot perform on
stage.
• Themes: this poem has 2 main themes, fame and theatre. “His name was quite
famous”, “the theatre is certainly not what it was”. The poem is entertaining and
uses personification
• Repetition: once in a while the sentence ‘was firefrorefiddle, the field of the fell’
appears. This is because Gus’s grandest creation.
• Speaker: there isn’t a specific voice in this poem, the voice is meant to be
universal.
• Names of characters: The main character, Gus, is actually called Asparagus which
is also the name of a vegetable.
• Fantasy vs reality: Depending on your point of view you can think of the poem as
a fantasy or a realistic poem. You may think it is a fantasy because cats don't
actually preform on stage. But you can also think it is a realistic poem for it is a
metaphor which describes human actions.
Whispers of Immortality
• "Whispers of Immortality" is a poem by T. S. Eliot. Written sometime
between 1915 and 1918, the poem was published originally in the
September issue of the Little Review. It is one of the quatrain poems,
a mode that Eliot had adapted from the mid-19th-century French
poet Theophile Gautier. The title is a fainter parody of William
Wordsworth's title of the poem, Intimations of Immortality.
Analysis
• The poem was developed in two sections; each contains four stanzas
and each stanza contains four lines. The first section where Eliot paid
homage to his great Jacobean masters in whom he found the unified
sensibility is a kind of "versified critique"[2] of Jacobean
writers, Webster and Donne in particular.
• The second section begins with a description of a modern Russian
woman Grishkin whose “friendly bust distil so rank a feline smell/ As
Grishkin in a drawing room.” In the concluding stanza, the narrator
said that even her charm is the subject of philosophy. Nevertheless
“our lot crawls between dry ribs/ To keep our metaphysics warm.”