Поэтика вкусовых характеристик в русской лирике

The article presents a study of taste epithets in the Russian poetry, their forms and image-creating function, especially in the 19th–20th centuries. Beginning in Romanticism, poets prefer direct and diverse taste epithets to present the sensual experiences of personality. Yet, they use metaphorical versions to form compound images and lyric plots. Different ways of connecting the direct and the metaphorical are illustrated in the article based on the example of poems of N. Nekrasov, I. Bunin, O. Mandelstam, A. Voznesensky, D. Samoilov and others.