Semantics of the title in T. Hughes’ poetry collection “Cave birds”

The article examines the structure and intertextual functions of the title in the poetry collection “Cave Birds” (1975), created by the English poet T. Hughes and illustrated by the American artist L. Baskin. According to critics, the abundance of alchemical metaphors and symbols, intermediality, as well as the implicit mythical narrative, the logic of which the poems follow, make the book semantically rich and difficult for readers to perceive. The heading complex itself has a polysemantic character, which is manifested in its structure (title, subtitle, marking the genre features of the book, as well as the original title, not included in the published version of the collection). The functional aspects of the title are determined based on the works of Russian researchers (Arnold I.V., Galperin I.R., Kozhina N.A., Krzhizhanovsky S.D.). The semantic elements of the final title complex (“cave”, “birds”, “alchemy”, “drama”), as well as the original title of the collection, are analyzed in relation to the structure of the author's myth by T. Hughes and its main conceptual elements. The article explains how the genre solution and the complicated symbolism anticipated in the title mark a stage in the general evolution of Hughes’ poetics: if in early collections polyphony was an internal property of individual poetic images, then in books of the mature period there is a multivoiced structure of relationships between poems, as well as various characters embedded in a single quest plot.