From “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” he often used such animal imagery as cats, possum, and other animals in his poems. Eliot was haunted by animal images in that he expressed his inner self through animal imagery. In particular, he frequently used reserved animals to show his true self. In his poems, Eliot articulated significance of such animals as possum, cat, rat, and rabbit because these animals hide their inner nature in their minds. In addition, animals react intuitional response as shown in possum and rats, animals are the perfect imagery to manipulate human mind. Therefore, Eliot used animal imagery to manifest human archetypal minds. In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Eliot connotes the imagery of a cat. In “Gerontion,” he called Christ the tiger because he was frighted by Christ as the absolute judge. In The Waste Land, the death that rats create is not a death which brings resurrection and new life like Jesus Christ, but brings about no life at all in the waste land. Especially, Eliot called himself “possum” in his letters to Pound. Even in his unpublished poem, “Cow,” the cow shows his panic emotion from his first marriage. Therefore, Eliot’s use of animal imagery makes significant roles to understand one of his major themes.

• Han-Mook Lee(Myongji University)