SOURCE: Sewell, Elizabeth. “‘In the Midst of His Laughter and Glee’: Nonsense and Nothingness in Lewis Carroll.” Soundings 82, nos. 3-4 (fall-winter 1999): 541-71.

In the following excerpt, Sewell explores the themes of death and nothingness in The Hunting of the Snark and “Three Voices.”

“Nonsense is how the English choose to take their Poésie pure.”

This sentence in one form or another keeps turning up in my pursuit of French poetry and of Nonsense over the last fifty years. I meant it originally as something of a squib, but it organized the contents of my first work of criticism, The Structure of Poetry, which dealt with that high priest of Pure Poetry, Stéphane Mallarmé, and of my second such book, The Field of Nonsense, dealing with Lewis Carroll. In the latter I cite Walter de la Mare as putting Nonsense and Pure Poetry side by side in...