Did poet Ted Hughes’s deserve the hate?

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Ted Hughes faced immense backlash from the feminist movement following Sylvia Plath's suicide in 1963 and Assia Wevill's suicide in 1969.

Do you think he deserved it? I’m asking because someone was taking to me about this and she thought he did, while I didn’t think he deserved all the vitriol which at times included death threats, physical attacks on his property, and being branded a murderer.

I felt very sorry for his children Frieda and Nicholas, as they both suffered and Nicholas later died by suicide, and Shura, who was murdered by her mother Assia Wevill at age 4.

Yes. I think TH was a selfish, womanising bastard.

Me too.

Yes, he was a cunt.

Do you think he “drove” them both to suicide?

He is entirely to blame?

I don’t think it matters exactly how much he contributed to both suicides. How he behaved in the relationships would be criminal now, on many levels. He’s not a person I would be interested in defending or trying to rehabilitate the opinion of.

Yes, I do think he drove them to suicide. It's not uncommon, as the article below highlights.

Revealed: The true toll of female suicides with domestic abuse at their core | Domestic violence | The Guardian

Firstly, this all happened 60 years or so ago, when the roles of men versus women was different in the main. Add into this the poetic temperament, the adulation of admirers of his poetry, and the suitability of the partnerships along with what would probably now be seen as mental health issues and you’ve built a pretty combustible bonfire.
In my opinion, accept fact through biography, and not judge today.
You could look at other poets throughout time - they were never good at partnerships, Dylan Thomas an easy example.

I think people are often too quick to vilify him based upon the headlines.

Things were very different in the 1960s. I’m not defending Ted Hughes, I just don’t think he deserved so much hate, which affected his children too.

His son Nicholas also died by suicide , what a terrible chain of events

I mentioned him in my original post. It was incredibly sad for his two children. They both suffered with their mental health.

Birthday Letters (Ted Hughes) is profoundly poignant.

I don't think he did entirely OP. I think Sylvia was probably also difficult to live with, and whilst he clearly had many faults, there was more at play in her death than just their marriage. As ever though, th children suffer, terribly sad. (Apropos of nothing , Hughes was given an honorary doctorate at my own graduation ceremony and he was astonishingly huge)

TH was a great poet.
He was also a selfish and abusive womaniser.p

It would be simplistic to say that he drove his partners to suicide, but his behaviour probably contributed to their mental health decline and ultimately may have driven them over the edge.

Sylvia's first suicide attempt was 3 years before she met Ted Hughes.

Ahem, this is actually my specialist subject 😳

There is quite a lot to it. Was TH a “womanising bastard” ? Yes, no doubt. Was SP a difficult, egotistical nightmare? Yes! AS was very mentally unstable and just as “sexually predatory” if that’s the phrase (heat addled brain) as TH.

I could go on for 50 pages on this but won’t bore everyone!

I think if you’ve read Sylvia Plath’s poetry and her ‘letters’ even before she met Ted Hughes, you can see she was very fragile. I think her suicide might have happened whether she’d met him or not.

No one can be party to the inside of any marriage though and there’s no doubt he was a self absorbed man and selfish man (no idea about the womanising).

As ever, it’s whether you feel you can enjoy the art but dislike the artist. I do enjoy his poetry and found ‘Birthday Letters’ made me see their relationship in a different light.

That’s what I was going to say - all were spectacularly difficult and impressive people. Beautiful, creative, demanding and depressive - combined with the restrictions of the time - what a lot of pressure.

I find it very interesting too. I read The Bell Jar in my teens which led me to Sylvia Plath’s poetry. I’ve also read The Lover of Unreason by Assia Weville. They were all very complex people.

I've said this elsewhere but my (much loved and great, always fairminded) English teacher knew 'Ted and Sylvia' quite well when they were all young. She said she didn't think Ted was a good husband but also and this is verbatim "Sylvia had a lot of problems long before she met him".

She was very fragile. In het last poem (Edge) written just days before she died, she wrote about killing her children.

Plath alleged, in letters that Hughes suppressed as executor of her literary estate, that he had been physically and emotionally abusive on several occasions.

For heaven's sake, fucking around and not washing very much doesn't change a whole lot through time. There is no such thing as the 'poetic temperament' any more than there is the 'novelistic temperament' or the 'painter temperament.' There are just people who write or make things. They're held to the same 'do no harm' ethics as the rest of us. Dylan Thomas was an addict, who wrote most of the work for which he's best known in his teens, before the drink took hold.

I think Hughes was, at times, a brilliant poet. I think some of his work is nonsense (Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete being?). I think he owed the entire trajectory of his career to Plath, who took his work just as seriously as her own, forced himself to take himself and his talent seriously, and did the gruntwork of typing up his poems, sending them out to journals, entering his work in competitions etc. Who knows whether he's ever have got started without her, but have remained an attractive serial shagger around Cambridge and London who dabbled a bit in verse?

Plath was also a difficult, complex, fragile individual, someone split between her enormous ambitions and talent, and her suburban American post-WW2 cookie-cutter norms. But while she furthered TH's career, I think she would almost certainly have lived longer had she not married him, and we would have more of her work. I'd rather more of her work than more of his.

The public hate affected his children. Frieda Hughes has been deeply affected by the hate directed at her father, Ted Hughes. She has frequently spoken out against the feminist activists and critics who blamed her father for her mother Sylvia Plath’s suicide.