The relevance of the research is related to the interest of modern linguistics in pragmatic and stylistic aspects of language, on the one hand, and to the scientific gap in studying the specifics of shortened poetic forms and their functioning, on the other hand. The article analyses reduced lexical units typical for English, Russian and Italian poetry. It focuses on the poetic connotative layer of semantics. An attempt has been made to reveal the productivity of various types of shortened lexemes in poetry. Such poetic devices as elision, contraction, syncope, apocope, apheresis, crasis, synaeresis are considered in the work. The terms for describing shortenings slightly differ in different linguistic schools, sometimes they are interchangeable. The work is based on the descriptive method and on the study of corpus data which prove the stylistic relevance of reduced words to poetry. The frequencies of full and shortened forms are contrasted in the main and poetry sections of the corpora. The article deals with the shortenings used only in poetry (poetic words) as well as the shortenings found both in poetry and other language registers. The work describes some universal and national peculiarities of using certain reductions in lyrics. It also analyses the reasons why poetic language applies shortened forms. The research contributes to the study of the genesis of poetic connotations.