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
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