Jellicle cats Jellicle cats "Jellicle cats", or simply the "Jellicles", are a type of feline mentioned in T. S. Eliot's book "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats", and in "Cats", a stage musical written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and based on the book. Introduced in Eliot's poem "The Song of the Jellicles", they were originally depicted as commonly nocturnal gray, scruffy cats. Specifically, Eliot mentions that they like to gather at an event called the "Jellicle Ball". In the musical, a sub-plot surrounds the disappearance of the Jellicle patriarch Old Deuteronomy. The names are taken from Eliot's poem "The Naming of Cats"
T. S. Eliot From 1898 to 1905, Eliot attended Smith Academy, where his studies included Latin, Ancient Greek, French, and German. He began to write poetry when he was fourteen under the influence of Edward Fitzgerald's "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam", a translation of the poetry of Omar Khayyam. He said the results were gloomy and despairing and he destroyed them. His first published poem, "A Fable For Feasters", was written as a school exercise and was published in the "Smith Academy Record" in February 1905. Also published there in April 1905 was his oldest surviving poem in manuscript, an untitled lyric, later revised