The article is devoted to the semantics and pragmatics of Russian poetry as deictic pointers to the poetic sphere and one of the six universal socio-cultural roles - the role of the poet-writer. The communicative role is interpreted as an element of speech behavior, determined by the basic communication settings: to be and to seem . It is shown that the stylistic coloring of poetry is formed only due to its stable correlation with the typical context and role; poeticisms by themselves do not create poetry and cannot even be considered as its obligatory feature, so they are primarily the subject of literary language theory and reflects the general cultural consciousness of speakers. In connection with the requirement to distinguish between the stylistics of language and speech, we review the difference between the poetic style of the language, which is a repository of poeticisms, from the poetic language as a style of speech (an operational system of techniques and tactics that ensure the performance of an artistic task); a detailed definition of poetic language is given. There is also a short observation of poeticisms at different levels of the linguistic system. The article proposes the description of the semantic structure of Russian poeticisms. It is emphasized that poeticisms can be used according to their artistic perspective (as a narrative tool, role-playing tool, to eliminate any speech image, in an ironic manner, etc.), however, their condensation in the text discloses the priority of an extra-aesthetic strategy of self-presentation in the role of a poet and, as a result, can be an indicator of “bad poetry”. This idea is shown on the example of a typical text of mass poetry saturated with poeticisms. The experience of compiling the poetic corpus of “Russian Live Stylistic Dictionary” discovers the possibility to identify the stylistic semantics of the word and to predict the artistic quality of the text.