snark. An imaginary animal that is the subject of Lewis Car- roll’s poem The Hunting of the Snark (1876). The elusive trou- blesome snark when finally tracked down turned out to be only a Boojum and hence the name snark (a combination Carroll made of snake and shark) has come to be applied to the quests of dreamers. It is said that the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti suf- fered from the delusion that Carroll caricatured him as the snark. |