Tom Eliot — a very practical cat. Did T.S. Eliot simply recycle every personal experience into poetry?

The musical Cats reopened in the West End in December, with a judge from The X Factor in the lead role. The music is by Andrew Lloyd Webber and the songs are, of course, by T.S. Eliot. Eliot died 50 years ago this year, and retains a curious kind of fame, which encompasses West End musicals and scholarly collections of his letters, lovingly published by Faber (most recently, Volume 5: 1930–1931. At 800 pages, this is for true Eliot-fanciers only). In 1948, a line from one of his poems was used in an ad for Esso petrol (‘Time future contained in time past’). In 1956, he gave a lecture on literary criticism in a baseball stadium in Minnesota, and 14,000 people turned up to listen. He was and remains a strange, paradoxical figure: a famous serious poet.

Eliot distrusted biography. In the essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, he advised: ‘To divert interest from the poet to the poetry is a laudable aim’, and he insisted that poetry must be impersonal; with good humour, he did his best to steer readers away from the details of the life. The fifth section of The Waste Land pictures a dry landscape, a place without forgiveness or growth, ‘Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees/ Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop.’ In the brief and cryptic notes he added to the poem, Eliot remarked of this line: ‘This is Turdus aonalaschkae pallassi, the hermit-thrush which I have heard in Quebec Province,’ and he cites a now-forgotten handbook of north American birds. It is a joke: self-consciously irrelevant, and a little mocking, as if such academic busy-work were beneath him, and with a very Eliotic smutty pun lurking inside the Latin name.

Now, Robert Crawford’s Young Eliot reveals quite how autobiographical Eliot was. Crawford explains that Eliot went camping in Quebec as a teenager, and has tracked down Eliot’s own copy of that handbook of birds, which was given to him by his mother and from which he identified the song of that actual Turdus.