The study refutes the prejudice that comic poems are inferior examples of the serious genre of lyric poetry. The comic deformations are actually produced by the very compression of the form and content of the serious poem; they come about as the result of the norms of the genre and exaggerations of fashions, styles and world-views, and in addition have an unwitting comic effect on later readers. This is even true of Paul Gerhardt's sacred poems or Schiller's love poetry. Masters of their art such as Goethe or Heine blend the serious and the comic and thus create a complex new type of genre.

Hans-Georg Kemper, Universität Tübingen.