The Naming of Cats

T. S. Eliot

We love dogs — but cats permit us to love them, and shouldn’t we be grateful for that?
     T. S. Eliot was, to my mind, the greatest modernist poet in English.  You might think that The Waste Land, on the dilapidation of post-war European culture, was thousands of lines long, so much does the poet compress into short scenes brilliantly drawn, and s…