The Hunting of the Snark of prose and its too appealing title. "The Athenaeum" described it as "the most bewildering of modern poetry," wondering "if he has merely been inspired to reduce to idiotcy as many readers and more especially reviewers, as possible." According to "Vanity Fair", Carroll's work had progressively worsened after "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (1865), with "The Hunting of the Snark" being the worst of his works and "not worthy [of] the name of nonsense". While "The Spectator" wrote that the poem's final line had the potential to become a proverb, it criticised the poem as "a failure" that might have succeeded
The Hunting of the Snark refused his illustration of the Boojum, preferring that the creature go without a depiction, and made him change his initial portrayal of the Broker, as it could be perceived as anti-semitic. When finally published, the poem comprised 141 stanzas of four lines each, with internal rhymes in the first and third lines of irregular stanzas appearing in the poem from the second fit onwards. In his poem, Lewis Carroll might have alluded to a limerick by Edward Lear. Instead of faces turning red or white, both authors let waistcoats display the bodily reactions of their owners to stress. To illustrate