The Awefull Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles The Awefull Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles "(Of) The Awefull Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles" (Together with Some Account of the Participation of the Pugs and the Poms and the Intervention of the Great Rumpus Cat) is a poem by T. S. Eliot, which appears in the book, "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" (published 1939). Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical "Cats" is adapted from the book, and "The Awefull Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles" is included in the musical, in which it is sung mostly by Munkustrap. It describes a battle between two neighbouring
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