Hunting the Snark

Hunting the Snark is a compendium of poetic terminology that mirrored American contemporary poetry of nineteen seventies and eighties written by Robert Peters. The book sorts through contemporary American poems, separating them into nearly a hundred categories. The book’s foreword is written by founder of the New York Quarterly, William M. Packard. He says, “Hunting the Snark is an extraordinarily well-informed, joyous encomium to poetry itself. It displays the variety and diversity of our contemporary American scene.”[1]

This article is about the Robert Peters book. For the Lewis Carroll poem, see The Hunting of the Snark.
Hunting the Snark
First edition cover
AuthorRobert Peters
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
GenrePoetry
PublisherParagon House
Publication date
1989
Pages396 pp
ISBN1-55778-052-8

Classifications and terminology

His classifications are concepts like: "Sylvia Plath Poems", "Wise Child poems", "Snapshot Poems", "Academic Sleaze", "Fruits-and-Flower-Poems", "Ezra Pound poems", "Jazz Poems", "Self-Pity Poems", "West Coast Poems".

Title

The title is a reference to Lewis Carroll’s poem "Hunting of the Snark".

Passel of Poets

Peters anthologizes in Hunting the Snark a comprehensive amount of poets and their poems including widely noted poets such as Robert Hass, Billy Collins, Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery to obscure noted poets Wilma McDaniel, Paul Vangelisti, David Ray and Alfred Starr Hamilton.

Sources

On the Trico libraries news and notes web,[2] library associate Evelyn Khoo chose the Hunting of the Snark as “Curious, Useful, Edifying, Inspiring: The Reference Books of McCabe Library". Khoo assesses the book as a book that replaces the standard poetry anthologies with the usual geographic or chronological format for most reference works, with classifications like "academic sleaze", "poultry poems", "bent genes poems", and "Disney poems".

Each category has a selection of classic and contemporary poets, which embody the spirit of each genre, tied together with Peters' critical analysis.

Poet and noted biographer of Sylvia Plath, Edward Butcher, wrote an essay on Peters, stating that he "fairly categorized terminologically American poems and poets with his original poetic terminology".[3]

References
  1. "Review". Powell's Books. Retrieved 23 April 2010.
  2. Reference Books of McCabe Library
  3. Great American Poetry Bake-Off-4th series


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