The article considers symbols as linguistic signs of expression of Fedor Potushnyak’s perception. The focus is on the fact that the symbol preserves a huge amount of information and is the key to understanding many mental and culturalhistorical phenomena. In fact, the symbols in a way «encode» the life of the people, forming its corresponding linguistic and cultural picture of the world. Every nation retains the richness of its traditions, which have been formed for centuries and which in today’s pragmatic world, unfortunately, are so easy to lose, especially if you seek a common cultural space. And this national and cultural code is fixed in the language; it is thanks to symbols that the cultural phenomenon is «objectified». Of course, not every cultural reality becomes a symbol, and not every token that names cultural reality has a symbolic meaning. A symbol «grows» only when reality acquires special significance in the life not only of a particular person, but also of society, religious community or cultural community, and the verbal symbol also needs traditions of word usage. A verbal symbol is a multifaceted open semantic structure that has the ability to detect several symbolic meanings in one context. The problem of determining the semantics of the symbol is due to its complex internal nature, ambiguity of interpretation, the dependence of interpretation on the individual reading of the text and the symbol in it. Each new reading of even the same or another text will evoke new associations and new interpretations, will involve other texts and symbols in this process. One of the links of Ukrainian symbolism of the 1930-s was the poetic work of F. Potushnyak, which absorbed the experience of Ukrainian and Western European modern culture. F. Potushnyak’s poetry is a holistic artistic system with produced key images-symbols, the lost aesthetic code of which must be rediscovered. Based on the symbolization of images of the sea, boats, distant, unknown pier, changes in nature, the poet models various existential situations of individual and universal existence in the infinity of living space, creates a paradigm of endless movement of humanity into the unknown , into the whirlpool of passions, impulses, dangers, dreams. Means of the latest poetic technique, contrasts of sounds and colors, polysemantism of images-symbols give the chance to recreate all the complexity of a person’s spiritual life.