Cats -- TS Eliot and the road to the musical. Episode 15 (Cats 1 of 8)

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TS Eliot had demons.  He wrote about his demons.  He said that writing poems were like demons escaping from his body, and that when he finished writing them he would experience a “moment of exhaustion, of appeasement, of absolution, and of something very near annihilation, which is in itself indescribable.”

He wrote a poem that would become the archetypical anthem of a newly-emerging modernist movement in literature – it was dark, and brooding and anxious, and grim, and disturbing and unsettling.  That poem would be called, cheerily enough, the wasteland.

And in the middle of all that, he would write a delightful children’s book about cats, that would be picked up by Andrew Lloyd Webber and transformed into one of the biggest Broadway smash hits of all time.

What’s up with TS Eliot?  What shaped this guy and made him tick.  What were his demons…and how does Cats fit into all of that?  

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