Abstract
The chapter takes a deeper theoretical dive into two poems, one by co-authors Josef Hiršal and Bohumila Grögerová, and another by Jaroslav Pížl. On close inspection, we would not necessarily associate them with poetry for children.
Both poems are not even originally intended for children. The aim of the study is to show what opens before us, if we take the poetry for children seriously.
It is to show those properties of poetry which go beyond narrow frame of literature for children, but at the same time create significant characteristic of the genre itself. Two poems we take as prototypes of playfulness and subversive character of poetry for children.
Both were selected from a representative Czech anthology Nebe, peklo, ráj: tyglík české poezie pro děti 20. století (2009), which also contains poems that were not primarily intended for children. In this way, the differences between poetry for children and poetry for adults are intentionally erased, which corresponds to basic intention of this study.
The key aspects of this study are the distance and tension that we find in both poems. They lead us to the linguistic code of the poems, which is formed in tensions between the sensorial and conceptual nature of the sign.