The Violent Energy of Ted Hughes :: Biography Biographies Essays

The Violent Energy of Ted Hughes Poetic contribution of blood and guts (Welsh 1) said one newspaper headline announcing the interlocking of Ted Hughes as the new Poet Laureate in November of 1984. It was fairly typical of the wonder with which the media greeted this appointment because Ted Hughes, it seems, is for most people a difficult poet. Hughes is frequently accuse of writing poetry which is unnecessarily rough and violent when he is plainly being a typically blunt Yorkshireman, describing things as he sees them. For example, his Moortown poems (which began as a journal recording his farming experiences) are non at all like the traditional romantic view of nature for which face poets are famous. There is no trace in them of the kind of sentiments verbalised in Elizabethan poet, Robert Herricks, lines - Fair daffodils we weep to see you haste international so soon (Rosengarten 98), or Wordsworths - I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high oer vales and hills (Ro sengarten 234). Poetry, for Hughes, is to do with the world of inclination He calls it a journey into the inner universe (Faas 29), and an exploration of the honorable self (Faas 32). Poetry (he once wrote is one way to unlock the doors of those many an(prenominal) mansions inside the head and express something - perhaps not much, just something - of the tweet of information that presses in on us....Something of the deep complexity that makes us just now the way we are.... Something of the inaudible music that moves us along in our bodies from second gear to moment like water in a river... (Faas 82) An excessive interrogation of the seamy, shocking side of Ted Hughes writing, particularly his animal poems, has characterized much of the critical worry paid to the poet laureate. Many scholars, such as Ben Howard, suggest that Hughes has often seemed the celebrant, if not the proponent of violence and destruction (253). This approach to his poetry, however, disregards the ima ginative depths Hughes discovers by engage violence. In his poem Pike (55 - 56), Hughes manipulates our kinesthetic awareness of violence by guiding us, in carefully constructed stages, into closer contact with the pike. With each of these progressive tense stages, we are introduced to violence of increasing magnitude and significance. The stages compromise a series of degrees the first in stanzas one through four, the second in stanza quintuple through the first two lines of six, the third through stanza seven, and the fourth in stanzas eight through eleven.