En guide i lyrikdjungeln. Om att jämföra dikt och låttext och att hitta en väg att gå.

Sammanfattning: Investigations have shown that many teachers experience difficulties when it comes to teaching lyricism and that many students have an almost hostile attitude towards the subject. Hence I wanted to discuss methods to facilitate the introduction of lyricism in the classroom for students and teachers alike. The purpose of this study has been to analyze the connections between Swedish poems and pop lyrics, regarding both similarities and differences, and to investigate the possibilities to utilize these different kinds of lyricism in the classroom. I have made a comparative analysis between two poems and the lyrics of two pop songs. All four texts were chosen using the same criteria: the texts had to be written in Swedish and they also had to be texts that adolescents, in some way, have been – or easily could be – confronted with. The poems were therefore picked from teaching material aimed for junior high school and the pop lyrics from Swedish billboards. Both poems and pop lyrics were analyzed using the same set of analysis tools. The results clearly showed that there were many similarities between the poems and pop lyrics studied and that, although the material is too small to generalize, one may conclude that pop lyrics could be used as a way of entry into working with more traditional kinds of lyricism. The results also showed a prominent difference between the poems and the pop lyrics regarding their content. While the subjects in the poems both were characters the same age as the proposed readers, the pop lyrics tended to revolve around young adults. In accordance with research done by others, the latter may increase the interest of the adolescent reader, since it provides a more adequate object of identification. These findings further enhance the prospect of using pop lyrics as an entry into lyricism as an attractive one.