The New Composite Poem in Contemporary Slovak Verse and its Relationship to the Development of Slovak Prose

Abstract

Poetry ranges from a simple lyric poem like a nursery rhyme to extensive lyric compositions with strong narrative or dramatic tones. The uniqueness of the individual fate can be expressed by the sovereign form of the sonnet as well as by an epic in its various cultural historical versions. Though it is clear that the effectiveness of a poem does not depend upon the number of its lines, a poet who has achieved a certain degree of human and artistic maturity, usually tries to express his individual intellectual and emotional experience in a more demanding form. In the Slovak poetry of the last 30 years that form is represented by the ‘composite poem’, which integrates the results and methods of the classical literary genres as well as the achievements of the new poetics of the twentieth century.