Transformation of Christian motifs in Ted Hughes’ poetry (based on the example of the Biblical Adam)

The article analyzes various manifestations of Adam’s biblical image in the work of the famous English poet Ted Hughes (1930-1998). Based on a sources review devoted to Hughes’ contradictory attitude to the Christian religion, the author of the article makes an assumption about Hughes’ gradual chronological transition from early criticism of Protestantism and the Reformation to the mature recognition of Christian symbols as fundamental for spiritual development of the humanity. The transformation of the poet’s worldview in some sense can be traced by the biblical image of the progenitor of mankind, Adam, who appears more than once as a character in Hughes’ poetic cycles of the 1970s. The analysis of the poems traces the evolution of Adam’s image from the object of irony and black humor (in “Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow”, 1970) to the universal metaphor of spiritual rebirth (“Adam and the Sacred Nine”, 1979) and the symbol of overcoming the dichotomy of soul and body (“Wolfwatching”, 1989). Adam’s place in the author’s mythological narrative, which is present in most of the poet’s artistic and critical works, is separately indicated. Special attention is paid to the analysis of the poetry collection “Adam and the Sacred Nine”, in which the immobility of the main character and the oneiric space where he resides can be compared with the existential feeling of abandonment, and with the state of splitting of human consciousness in the modern world. The pathos of the poetry collection is interpreted as a call to get rid of the “ego” of the material world, phantoms of “false mythology”. Using the example of several poems, it is shown how the leitmotivs of the author’s myth, appearing within the framework of individual episodes, are embedded in the general narrative structure of T. Hughes, with its movement “from the world of blood to the world of light” (K. Sagar).