To test whether student tastes in poetry could be modified by a particular method of teaching it, the poetic preferences of 751 eighth grade students were pretested and compared with the poetic choices made by a panel of English educators, 35 student teachers in English, and the students' own English teachers. Consistently, poems selected by any of the three adult groups were rejected by the eighth grade students who preferred metrically regular, rhymed verse written in conventional forms employing the personal voice and avoiding imagery. Students were then arranged homogeneously in five groups according to their IQ, sex, maturity, parental education background, achievement in school, attitudes, toward school, college, and poetry, and their poetic preferences. One group was used as a control, while the other four groups were taught by one of the following methods--reading poetry, writing poetry, discussing preferences in poetry, and answering questions about specific poems. Post-tests indicated that students in all four experimental groups made practically the same choices as they had before the treatments and were even more likely to reject poems selected by adults than before. Findings indicated that the likelihood of students acquiring an adult taste in poetry is remote at the junior high level regardless of which teaching method is employed. (Author/JB)