The given paper examines the phenomenon of the picture of the world and its varieties - conceptual, linguistic and poetic pictures of the world. The author differentiates these varieties, providing comparative examples of the interpretation of the world by the means of the national language. A characteristic is given of the poetic picture of the world, in which the experience of an individual poet who has influence on the entire national culture has been accumulated. The research puts forward the important thesis that poetry reflects a different reality, which is constructed through the prism of the poet’s linguistic consciousness and is the result of his spiritual activity, and the perception of a poetic text is an impact not only on the intellect, but also on emotions, on the aesthetic component of communication. Comparing the Russian and Belarusian pictures of the world, the author concludes that the Russian linguistic picture of the world is more characterized by the presence of “quality”, greater “anthropocentricity”, emotional loading, attachment not to the mental, but to the emotional sphere of a person.