Jabberwocky

“Jabberwocky,” written by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, is widely considered the most famous Nonsense poem in the English language, as well as one of the most famous, if not the most famous, poems to emerge from the Victorian era.

Carroll wrote the first verse in 1855 at the age of 23 while staying with his cousins at their family home of Whitby. Titled “Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Verse,” it was published as his contribution to the family comic magazine Mischmasch, along with a list of definitions meant to clarify or translate its made-up words. He later completed the remaining five stanzas by 1867, and the poem known as “Jabberwocky” was published complete as a part of the first chapter of Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There in 1871.

Since that time, “Jabberwocky” has become Lewis Carroll’s best-known and most discussed poem. It was, in a sense, adopted by Dadaists and Surrealists as an inspirational text of sorts. And it has been defended and promoted over the years by leading literary figures including T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and W. H. Auden. It has been filmed many times, translated into 65 languages, and gone on to become a favorite of readers of poetry both young and old, as well as a source of interest, inquiry, and inspiration for all kinds of people, including English professors, computer programmers, researchers in the fields of linguistics, visual artists, philosophers, logicians, mathematicians, physicists, psychologists, folklorists, politicians, literary critics, creators of children’s programming, and poets.