Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject German Studies - Genres, grade: 2, University of Bremen, language: English, abstract: This paper deals with the characteristics and properties of children's poetry, especially in distinction to adult poetry. The idea to work out this topic arose in a lecture in which the question was raised whether the poem "Es führt dich meilenweit von dannen" by Friedrich Schiller, taken from a book of poems for children, was actually a children's poem. In this work, it should become clear which characteristics indicate that a poem belongs to children's poetry, or is suitable for children. At the beginning of the paper, I define the concept of poetry, especially children's poetry. I briefly discuss how difficult it is to find characteristic features that describe only children's poetry and explain why children's poetry is nevertheless a separate area of lyric poetry.I give an overview of structures and elements frequently used in children's poetry in Chapter 2, and sample poems for individual characteristics are included in the appendix. In chapter 3 I explain the difference between children's and adult poetry. For this purpose, I compare a children's poem and an adult poem. In chapter 4, I deal specifically with the child reader and describe which factors, in addition to the structure of the text, play a role so that a child understands the content of a poem. In particular, I describe the problems that children have in reading the above poem "Es führt dich meilenweit von dannen".