Into the Feline Umwelt: An Exploration of Eliot and Shawqi’s ‘Mind-style’ Conceptualization of Cats

In the past, people thought that earth was the center of the universe. More recently, people think that they are the most important on Earth. These speculations raise the question: why do humans have this subjective view of the world? Uexküll’s (1934) theory of the umwelt provides a very reasonable answer. To Uexküll, each species perceives the surrounding world in a way that agrees with their perceptive abilities and their interests. Accordingly, people are oblivious to other parallel umwelts that exist beyond their borders. One umwelt they are oblivious to is that of the animals. However, writers across the ages have tried to depict animals’ lives in their narratives. Based on Uexküll’s theory, these accounts carry subjective views. In this regard, the current study attempts to examine two poets’ views of the feline umwelt. T. S. Eliot and Ahmed Shawqi are celebrated poets who belong to the same age; by comparing their conceptualization of the feline umwelt, much can be revealed about their subjective views on the one hand, and how these views are influenced by cultural ideologies, on the other. To conduct the analysis, Leech and Short’s (2007) stylistic approach to ‘mind-style’ is adopted, integrating some tools from Leech (1991) to spotlight some of the poetic devices employed in the poems. The study concludes that Shawqi and Eliot adopt many similar tools in their depiction of the feline umwelt; however, their overall depiction differs, which proves that their account of the feline umwelt is subjective and is bound to cultural influences.