The Violent Energy of Ted Hughes"Poetic voice of blood and guts" (Welsh 1) ran a newspaper headline announcing the appointment of Ted Hughes as the new Poet Laureate in November 1984. It was quite typical of the surprise with which the media greeted this appointment because Ted Hughes, it seems, is for most people a difficult poet. Hughes is often accused of writing unnecessarily rough and violent poetry when he is simply your typical straight-faced Yorkshireman, describing things as he sees them. For example, his Moortown poems (which began as a diary in which he recorded his agricultural experiences) bear little resemblance to the traditional Romantic view of nature for which English poets are famous. There is no trace in them of the kind of feelings expressed in the lines of the Elizabethan poet Robert Herrick - "Fierce daffodils we weep to see you run away so soon" (Rosengarten 98), in those of Orworth - "I have wandered lonely as a floating cloud high above valleys and hills" (Rosengarten 234). Poetry, for Hughes, deals with the world of the imagination; He calls it “a journey into the inner universe” (Faas 29) and “an exploration of the authentic self” (Faas 32). Poetry (he once wrote) is a way to: "open the doors of those many mansions inside the head and express something - perhaps not much, just something - of the crush of information that oppresses us... Something of the profound complexity that makes us exactly as we are... Something about the inaudible music that makes us move in our body from moment to moment like water in a river..." (Faas 82) An over-analysis of the seedy and shocking side of Ted La Hughes's writing, especially his "poems on animals,” has characterized much of the critical attention paid to the poet laureate. Many scholars, such as Ben Howard, suggest that Hughes "often seemed the celebrant, if not the advocate of violence and destruction." (253). This approach to his poetry, however, ignores the imaginative depth that Hughes discovers in pursuing 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 stages, we are introduced to violence of increasing magnitude and significance. The stages compromise a series of degrees: the first from stanzas one through four, the second from the fifth to the first two lines of six, the third through stanza seven, and the fourth in stanzas eight through eleven.