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 of art must be viewed in the context of the artist's previous works, a "simultaneous order" of works (i.e., "tradition"). Eliot himself employed this concept on many of his works, especially on his long-poem "The Waste Land". Also important to New Criticism was the idea—as articulated in Eliot's essay "Hamlet and His Problems"—of an "objective correlative", which posits a connection among the words of the text and events, states of mind, and experiences. This notion concedes that a poem means what it says, but suggests that there can be a non-subjective judgment based on different readers' different—but perhaps corollary—interpretations of