“100 The Arts Past and Present – Assignment 3 Part 2 Reading Poetry: The Faber Book of Beasts. Thom Gunn (Apartment Cats) and Thomas Flatman (An Appeal to Cats in the Business of Love) in The Faber Book of Beasts (pp.5-6). Compare the way in which the poets Thom Gunn (Apartment Cats) and Thomas Flatman (An Appeal to Cats in the Business of Love) represent cats.”

Being familiar with the tongue they call jazz, my initial response upon reading the titles of the poems was to wonder whether the Cats being discussed would be of that ilk. A brief checking of the period in which the two poets were writing confirmed that Thom Gunn would have been writing at a period when the usage of cats was a jazz scene colloquialism he may have been aware of, however Thomas Flatmans composition is from a far earlier period, in the 17th Century. Cats in both instances have been subtly personified – the usage of Girls to open Gunns piece, and Men to mark the change in rhyme scheme of Flatmans….(short extract)