The Research on the Reception of Poetry in Students Aged 12–15

This paper presents the first results of the research of the reception of poetry conducted at lower secondary schools (students aged 12–15). The method of semantic differential was used for the research. This method in its standard form makes it possible to measure psychological aspects of concepts in human minds with the use of three factors: evaluation, potency and activity. This method was modified and adjusted to the examination of the reception of lyric poetry. We succeeded in isolating three factors which were labeled as the factor of comprehensibility, evaluation and impressiveness. We have used this research instrument solely for monitoring the reception of poetry in adolescent readers (aged 15–19) so far. In current research, we also tried to focus on the students of lower secondary schools aged 12–15 and we tried to verify the research instrument for a younger age group, too. The students assessed eight poems on different topics and of different forms: poetry for children and teenage readers, impressionist poetry, romanticism poetry, decadent poetry, old Japanese five-line poem haiku etc. We monitored the differences in the reception of the assessed poems between particular groups of respondents (according to age, sex, reading preferences, field of study and personality traits). The article presents the methodology of processing the results and how the differences between particular groups of respondents were monitored and also the results of the reception of Pushkin's poem ‘The Cloud’.