The Hunting of the Snark the poem, among them existential angst, an allegory for tuberculosis, and a mockery of the Tichborne case. "The Hunting of the Snark" has been alluded to in various works and has been adapted for musicals, opera, plays, and music. "The Hunting of the Snark" shares its fictional setting with Lewis Carroll's earlier poem "Jabberwocky" published in his children's novel "Through the Looking-Glass" (1871). Eight nonsense words from "Jabberwocky" appear in "The Hunting of the Snark": bandersnatch, beamish, frumious, galumphing, jubjub, mimsiest (which previously appeared as mimsy in "Jabberwocky"), outgrabe and uffish. In a letter to the mother of his young
What Work Is sometimes been criticized for leaning too hard on his blue-collar "bona fides". The critic Adam Kirsch, writing in "The Times Book Review" in 1999, noted, accurately enough, that “in his autobiographical essays he goes out of his way to tell us that he is essentially a peasant.” David Baker, writing about "What Work Is" (1991) in the "Kenyon Review", said Levine has “one of our most resonant voices of social conviction and witness, and he speaks with a powerful clarity…What Work Is may be one of the most important books of poetry of our time. Poem after poem confronts the