The Hunting of the Snark Becker Lennon, the poem's "motif of loss of name or identity" is typical of Carroll's work. Richard Kelly writes that the poem contains a "theme of annihilation." Furthermore, Edward Guiliano feels that the "Snark" is within the nonsense tradition of Thomas Hood and, especially, W. S. Gilbert, the librettist of the famous Gilbert and Sullivan team. According to him, a case can be made for a direct influence of Gilbert's Bab Ballads on "The Hunting of the Snark", based on the fact that Carroll was well-acquainted with the comic writing and the theatre of his age. In response to various
Lewis Carroll: A Biography handling of the material to Carroll's boat trips with the children, saying, "With Cohen at the tiller, we are deftly guided through the flow of Carroll's life." Ronald Warwick in "Times Higher Education" criticises Cohen's interpretation of Carroll's relationship with his archdeacon father; his "insecure grasp of 19th-century ecclesiastical history"; his prose, which Warwick called cliched; and his choice to use Dodgson's first name, which Warwick said was not used even by Dodgson's most intimate male friends. Lewis Carroll: A Biography Lewis Carroll: A Biography is a 1995 biography of author Lewis Carroll by Morton N. Cohen, first published by