Inventory Genre Annotation

Barbauld uses the poetic genre of the comic inventory to address her friend Dr. Priestley. There are several inventory poems written and published around the time Barbauld lived. Her obvious familiarity with the genre’s conventions can be seen by reading the three other examples of inventory poems provided below. The date of Swift’s poem is given by McCarthy, and the other two poems’ dates are taken from Literature Online’s database (lion.chadwyck.com).

Barbauld’s inventory poem, however influenced by previous poems in the genre, plays with the conventional form by including direct quotations supposedly written by Priestley and spoken by the reader of the poem, as well as by departing from the standard form in which the speaker merely lists items and only implies irony/satire. Barbauld generally spends more time on the objects she inventories and adds more commentary than the authors of the poems below.

You can view three examples of other inventory poems on this website. Click here for Jonathan Swift's, here for Thomas Dermody's, and here for an excerpt from Elizabeth Thomas's.

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