This article studies structural-semantic and compositional aspects of the poetic anagram, which reflects the cognitive and linguistic picture of the world, as well as the national conceptual sphere. It is noted that the anagram genre originated in Russian poetry in the 1820s on the pages of the magazine “Blagonamerenny”. It published the first theoretical justification of such enigmatic genres as a riddle, a logogriff, a charade and a homonym. Its author was the famous statesman N. F. Ostolopov.