Hunting the Snark is a compendium of poetic terminology that mirrored American contemporary poetry of nineteen seventies and eighties written by Robert Peters

Robert Peters

Robert Louis Peters is a poet, critic, scholar, playwright, editor, and actor born in an impoverished rural area of northern Wisconsin in 1924. He holds a Ph.D in Victorian literature. His poetry career began in 1967 when his young son Richard died unexpectedly of spinal meningitis...

. 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

New York Quarterly

The New York Quarterly is a popular contemporary American poetry magazine. Established by William M. Packard in 1969, Rolling Stone Magazine has called the NYQ "the most important poetry magazine in America."- History :...

, 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.”

Classifications and Terminology

His classifications are concepts like: "Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. Born in Massachusetts, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College, Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a professional poet and writer...

 Poems", "Wise Child poems", "Snapshot Poems", "Academic Sleaze", "Fruits-and-Flower-Poems", "Ezra Pound poems", "Jazz Poems", "Self-Pity Poems", "West Coast Poems".

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

Robert Hass

Robert L. Hass is an American poet. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. He was awarded the 2007 National Book Award and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Time and Materials.-Life:...

, Billy Collins

Billy Collins

Billy Collins is an American poet, appointed as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He is a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York and is the Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Winter Park Institute, Florida...

, Denise Levertov

Denise Levertov

-Early life and influences:Levertov was born and grew up in Ilford, Essex.Couzyn, Jeni Contemporary Women Poets. Bloodaxe, p74 Her mother, Beatrice Spooner-Jones Levertoff, came from a small mining village in North Wales...

, Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Cecile Rich is an American poet, essayist and feminist. She has been called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century."-Early life:...

, John Ashbery

John Ashbery

John Lawrence Ashbery is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. But Ashbery's work still proves controversial...

 to obscure noted poets Wilma McDaniel, Paul Vangelisti

Paul Vangelisti

Paul Vangelisti is an United States poet and broadcaster. He graduated from the University of San Francisco in 1967 with a Bachelor of Arts in English and Philosophy...

, David Ray and Alfred Starr Hamilton

Alfred Starr Hamilton

Alfred Starr Hamilton was an American poet. A lifelong resident of Montclair, New Jersey, Hamilton contributed to many small presses, including Epoch, New Directions, Foxfire, New Letters, Archive, Poetry Now, American Poetry Review and Greenfield Review...

.

Sources

On the Trico libraries news and notes web, 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

Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. Born in Massachusetts, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College, Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a professional poet and writer...

, Edward Butcher, wrote an essay on Peters, stating that he "fairly categorized terminologically American poems and poets with his original poetic terminology".