The article explores the ways of creating neologisms in modern poetic speech as an individual intralinguistic need of a poet to reflect on the potentialities of language in creating his neologisms and in search for original ways of poetic expression. The material of the study is N. Delalande’s poetry aimed at updating the linguistic forms. The article reveals structural and semantic methods of forming nonce words and stylistic devices of their functioning as well as determines the author's intentions to integrate nonce words into poetic speech. Particular attention is paid to contamination as the author's productive method. The article shows how the combination and the semantic interaction of linguistic units or their parts with their structural, functional or associative proximity lead to grammatical, lexical and semantical diffuseness. The paper also analyses the relation of the author's nonce words to the context and the author's subjective assessment of their new qualities and properties.