Macavity Macavity Macavity is a fictional character who is described in a poem in "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats", by T. S. Eliot. He also appears in "Cats", the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. The name "Macavity" is a pun by T. S. Eliot, on the names of several characters from other works of literature : "Macheath," a supervillain who appears both in John Gay's "The Beggar's Opera", its sequel "Polly" and roughly 200 years later as Mack the Knife in "The Threepenny Opera" written by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill in 1928, "macuahuitl", the Aztec obsidian sword, and "Moriarty", the
T. S. Eliot one of the most moving poems Eliot wrote, and perhaps the "most perfect", though it was not well received by everyone. The poem's groundwork of orthodox Christianity discomfited many of the more secular "literati". In 1939, Eliot published a book of light verse, "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" ("Old Possum" was Ezra Pound's nickname for him). This first edition had an illustration of the author on the cover. In 1954, the composer Alan Rawsthorne set six of the poems for speaker and orchestra in a work titled "Practical Cats". After Eliot's death, the book was adapted as the basis