The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits

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Carroll's nonsense epic (1876) follows a crew of bizarre characters — a Bellman, a Beaver, a Baker, a Banker — on a voyage to hunt an unknown creature called the Snark, which turns out to be a Boojum. The poem is simultaneously a satire of Victorian adventure narrative, a philosophical meditation on meaninglessness, and one of the most perfectly sustained exercises in comic logic in English poetry. Read aloud — especially with different voices for the narrator and the crew members — it is gloriously entertaining and surprisingly profound.