Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats director of the publishing company Faber and Faber. Morley's daughter, Susanna Smithson, uncovered the poem as part of the BBC Two programme "Arena: T.S. Eliot", broadcast that night as part of the BBC Poetry Season. Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939) is a collection of whimsical poems by T. S. Eliot about feline psychology and sociology, published by Faber and Faber. It is the basis for the musical "Cats". Eliot wrote the poems in the 1930s, and included them, under his assumed name "Old Possum", in letters to his godchildren. They were collected
T. S. Eliot went to Oxford instead. At the time so many American students attended Merton that the Junior Common Room proposed a motion "that this society abhors the Americanization of Oxford". It was defeated by two votes, after Eliot reminded the students how much they owed American culture. Eliot wrote to Conrad Aiken on New Year's Eve 1914: "I hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books and hideous pictures on the walls ... Oxford is very pretty, but I don't like to be dead." Escaping Oxford, Eliot spent much of his