One of the most unusual poems ever written, "The Hunting of the Snark" is the uncontested masterpiece of nonsense verse. The verbal richness and flexibility of the English language are exploited to the utmost in this riotously funny, formally perfect, and delightfully absurd narrative poem about a strange assortment of characters out to hunt a fearsome creature known, among other things, for its habit of getting up so late that it breakfasts af five-o'clock tea and dines on the following day. No review can do justice to a work as original and extraordinary as this one, written more than a century ago to entertain Victorian children, but read now mostly by grownups. This is the very pinnacle of British humor, soaring far above even Monty Python's most inspired moments.
The Hunting of the Snark
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Author Description
Lewis Carroll was the pen-name of the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Born in 1832, he was educated at Rugby School and Christ Church, Oxford, where he was appointed lecturer in mathematics in 1855, and where he spent the rest of his life. In 1861 he took deacon's orders, but shyness and a constitutional stammer prevented him from seeking the priesthood. He never married, but was very fond of children and spent much time with them. His most famous works, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872), were originally written for Alice Liddell, the daughter of the dean of his college. Charles Dodgson died of bronchitis in 1898.