The poem-inventory in the poetry of J. Pr'evert, M. Kal'eko, G. Eich and R. Gernhardt: comparative analysis

The article anylises four poems belonging to the descriptive genre («inventory») and reflecting their authors' poetological principles. The inventory is close to the literary testament genre that involves describing values which an author leaves the next generation. The descriptiveness doesn't eliminate hermetic features of the poems. Repetition is especially typical of the «inventory» as a genre. It plays a role of a poetical refrain which brings a represented object to generalization. The poems are written in a free verse form, the end rhyme is replaced by alliterations, assonances and anaphoras. Three poems - «Inventaire» by Jack Prévert., «Inventur» by Mascha Kaléko and «Inventur» by Günter Eich - were created under the impression of the war and show how a lyrical hero seeks for their identity in the period of destruction of the history. All the poems were written in minimalist style, which would later become the main feature of the concrete poetry. Prévert's poem was created under the influence of modernism aesthetics, which was connected with cinematographic methods of montage and collage. It is an example of the simultaneous style implying no hierarchy of cultural and social values and no plot. Kaléko's poem represents problems faced by emigrants after the war and shows four periods of an emigrant's life: bombing, fleeing, living in a strange country, painful returning. The poem is laconic (it consists of four strophes), emphatic and autobiographic (Mascha Kaléko left Nazi Germany and lived in America and Israel until her death). «Inventur» by Eich is a «camp poem» (Vogt): after the war, as a soldier Eich spent 2,5 months in an American camp. It is a «poetological poem» (Kaiser): it has different features of an ode, a sonnet, old German rhymes, etc. It is a hermetic poem: its metaphors have different meanings. It is a praetext for many poems of contemporary authors (Н. M. Enzensberger, D. Petersdorff, R. Gernhardt etc.). «Inventur» by Robert Gernhardt, which is a literary parody of Eich's crypto-sonnet, became an epochal work in German poetry of the second half of the XXth century.