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.

I don't think you can use the poetry as a way of reading who Sylvia Plath was. In 'Edge' she was probably channelling the story of Medea. In real life she took care to try and seal off the room in which she gassed herself - and she left food out for the children, for the next morning.

Somebody I used to know was friends with Sylvia Plath's landlord at the time. He confided that a night or so after his suicide, Ted Hughes and his mates had a wild celebratory party.

On the other hand, he appears to have formed a much more stable relationship with another woman later on - who was a good stepmother to the children.

I think Sylvia Plath was struggling with looking after small children, in a desperately cold English winter - away from some of the people in the US who might have helped her. And felt, as many women have done since, that having invested a lot in the idea of marriage with someone who had qualities she admired - that it was just overwhelmingly difficult to see her way forward.

If she'd been the sort of person who wanted to go out with a nice steady bloke who had a good job in a bank, and didn't really understand about poetry - but thought it was nice to have a partner who wrote well, it all might have ended happily. But she wasn't and it didn't.

I’ve read that too, and I agree. Assia Weville died by suicide the same way as Sylvia Plath (gas oven) but killed her daughter too.

'her' suicide. Not 'his'.

Many women who end up taking their own life do so as a result of the treatment they received from the men in their lives.

Arrived in Paris early Saturday evening exhausted from sleepless holocaust night with Ted in London . . . I took myself in leash and washed my battered face, smeared with a purple bruise from Ted and my neck raw and wounded, too. Barely a year later, as the newly married couple was teaching in Massachusetts, Plath caught Hughes with another woman, a co-ed; this erupted in a spectacular fight, which left Plath with a sprained thumb and Hughes with “bloody claw marks.”

https://lithub.com/why-are-we-so-unwilling-to-take-sylvia-plath-at-her-word/

Ted Hughes did acknowledge his infidelity, his betrayal, and the profound guilt he felt over his behavior during the final months of their marriage. Birthday Letters is essentially a love letter to Sylvia Plath.

Well you are defending him a bit, aren’t you?

I’m not defending him, I think the public hate toward him was very harmful to his two children and affected them very badly.

I find it a very beautifully-written series of self-exonerations.

You’re perfectly entitled to a differing opinion but do you need to be quite so aggressive in presenting that?

There’s a poem by Simon Armitage called Not The Furniture Game which is about Ted Hughes and his size being overwhelming. It’s worth a read.

Excusing male behaviour makes me a bit cross too.

What did you think was 'aggressive'? The expression 'for heaven's sake'? I mean, it's a bit amusing that you're excusing Hughes' aggressive and serially priapic sexual behaviour, but when someone says 'For heaven's sake' to you online, you quail?

Yes, two of the women he was supposed to love and care for killed themselves , he was a selfish bastard

I’m not excusing male behaviour, but the public hatred towards Ted Hughes deeply affected his children. The anger was so profound that Plath's tombstone in West Yorkshire was repeatedly vandalised by people trying to chisel the "Hughes" off her surname.

1962-3 was a lengendarily bitter and prolonged winter. For weeks Plath had been waiting for the GPO to instal a telephone in her new flat. This was normal for then, a time when they were much less common in British households, but Plath was a North American to whom a telephone was as natural and vital as our mobiles are to us today.
If she'd had the telephone and been less horribily isolated she may have survived that awful winter.

Hughes was a rotter, obsessed with gore, but wrote some great poems (s well as some fair tosh). I've never been clear what all the vitriol was supposed to achieve beyond making people feel good about themselves while purporting to express solidarity in feminism.

Did he deserve the public hatred which lasted for years, and profoundly affected his children?

Sylvia Plath also found out that Assia Weville was pregnant with Ted Hughes’s child. She discovered the pregnancy shortly before her suicide in February 1963

I don't think anybody's children deserve to be affected by public hatred towards a parent, certainly not in the case of Hughes and Plath's children. I think the expression of hatred towards Hughes, which was related solely to his behaviour, went way over the top. Think the guy's a bastard? Don't buy the books, don't read the work. If you think Hughes deserved his opprobrium maybe you think Salman Rushdie deserved his fatwa? A lot of people were very upset by the Satanic Verses.

Hughes was much better known as a poet than Sylvia Plath was. She only really attained fame posthumously with the Ariel poems. Which are remarkable, but the the mythology about her short and often tragic life helps. Similarly if Van Gogh had lived to a ripe old age, his work would not be that celebrated. (Other Impressionists didn't rate him that highly.)

She was in part less known during her lifetime because she was operating in a remarkably literary sexist world still in thrall to the idea of the male poet, but also because she dedicated a lot of time to forwarding his career (she spent significant chunks of time until The Hawk in the Rain was published typing up his work, sending it to journals etc, a far more time-consuming job than now), she was often the one who was also a full-time postgrad and later on the one with the demanding paying job at Smith, because she published The Bell Jar under a pseudonym, and because she was doing the gruntwork of raising two small children.

I would love to hear more. Would you consider starting a thread? I don't want to derail but would be fascinating to hear your thoughts

I don't find the analysis that Sylvia Plath's work wasn't appreciated because she was female wholly convincing. She was a hard working writer who wanted commercial success via short fiction, as well as literary success in the poetry world. She was regularly published in both marketplaces. There's a level on which some of the time it worked well for her to be married to another writer. They read each other's work and encouraged one another. (Relatives of my husband live in the London flat they shared before moving to Devon, which is probably when they were happiest. But Plath's earlier poems were relatively derivative, though beautifully crafted. There's probably a sense in which the break up of her mariage liberated her to write her most innovative work. But her creativity and her destructiveness were finely balanced.

This whole trope of the male genius who isn’t hide bound by normal constraints and women should be happy to service him for his art is so depressing and tedious….

Not directly related, but the “poetic temperament “ is nonsense , imo. I don’t think it exists.