Pound and Eliot seemed to regard “the proximity of black speech to their own” as “both an opportunity to be seized and an affliction to be regretted,” the literary critic Michael North writes, in “The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature.” Eliot’s fondness for doggerel and light verse, in particular, was intertwined with a racist notion of blackness as a gateway to cultural disruption and linguistic play. “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” required an authorial persona that facilitated outright foolishness for Eliot, and though explicit racism largely vanishes within the actual text, it does jump out occasionally, most of all in “Growltiger’s Last Stand,” in which Eliot, describing Growltiger, a grisly pirate cat, writes, “But most to Cats of foreign race his hatred had been vowed; / To Cats of foreign name and race no quarter was allowed.” The “Chinks” swarm Growltiger’s vessel, and his lady cat screeches, “badly skeered.”