This article is concerned with research on the reception of poetry amongst adolescent readers. Unlike a number of other research projects aimed at the external aspects of reception, the intention here was to discover and describe readers’ experiences by means of an exact statistical method in combination with the expressed thoughts of the respondents, and then to use these results in the teaching of literature at primary and secondary schools. The researchers focused on the reception of poetry from around the world (including the Czech Republic), which had topics related to nature. In the selection of verse, the researchers sought to ensure that each work represented the poetry of a given historical period or artistic trend as faithfully as possible. The texts were presented to the students anonymously. The researchers sought to ensure that the respondents used only the texts to make their assessments, excluding extra-literary information. In the search for a suitable tool to research the reception of lyric verse about nature, the researchers started from the ‘semantic differential’. In a number of initial investigations they managed to isolate three factors, which they call ‘intelligibility’, ‘evaluation’, and ‘expressiveness’. These provide important information on various aspects of reception. The obtained results offer insight into the actual process of perceiving poetry and the readers’ psychology, and also help to determine the axiological preferences of young people today. The research confirms the existence of striking differences in the reception of poems of various historical periods, and also demonstrates which poems are preferred by which categories of respondents. One particularly important discovery has to do with the means of perceiving an artistic text in which the individual students’ personal associations play a substantial role. These associations work together to create the meaning of a text in a reader’s mind and, because of their diversity, enrich the resulting discussions. They can then be fruitfully employed to motivate readers to find a way into the poems.