The book of the famous philologist A.K. Zholkovsky includes sixteen articles on Russian poetry of the XX century. (from Mikhail Kuzmin to Boris Ryzhy). The analysis of texts devoted to the interaction of semantics, structure and literary background is based on the theory of poetic invariants, the toolkit of poetry (in particular, the doctrine of halos of meters), the concept of grammar poetry and the concept of infinitive writing. The book is rich in ideas and requires careful reading, but it is written simply, accessible to an educated layman and can serve as a textbook for students of philological faculties.