The Language of Poems for Children: A Stylistic Case Study

This chapter in a book on Children's Literature takes the poems in Roger McGough's (2002) anthology entitled 100 Poems for Children and subjects them to a rigourous stylistic analysis with the aim of discovering whether there are any particular stylistic tendencies in poems aimed at younger readers.
The conclusions are that strong patterning, particularly sound-patterning is evident at a time when this is less common in poetry for adults. However, the broad range of other linguistic features to be found in poems for adults is also evident here, especially in poems aimed at older children.

This chapter is part of an Open University text, and is intended to work as an introduction to stylistic analysis as well as a case study as described above.