The article dwells upon the importance of extra-textual information for the reception of a poetical text. The onnet by Martinus Nijhoff (1894-1953) «The Mother the Woman» (1934), one of the most famous Dutch poems of the 20th century, contains a number of strange or illogical lexical, grammatical and phonetic elements which can be understood only if the reader has enough information about Nijhoff s method («magic realism»), philosophy and some biography facts (the first level of extra-textual information). The later celebrity of the poem and its rich associations (the second level of extra-textual information) are also important for the receptor because they have also enriched the content of the text.
