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.

When I read letters and poems between them, it just screams coercive control

Ha!

That's not the point of being a literary executor though, is it? @SinisterPeaches is quite correct in what she says upthread. He had many other options that would have protected his children but also preserved Plath's literary legacy. And I speak as someone who doesn't particularly enjoy much of what she wrote.

As my first post indicated, different times. I have enough age to understand the changing nature of relationships and see that those in the 60s were patriarchal to a degree not readily able to be appreciated by someone in their 20/30s. That’s fact, no right or wrong. But it does support that my 68 year old view will differ from others.

Or Laura Riding.

The Robert Graves situation has some uncanny similarities with parts of the Ted and Sylvia (and the rest) relationship(s).

He probably would’ve been grieving too.

I think he was attracted to mentally unstable women, who he then treated so badly it is almost as if he took a perverse pleasure in destroying them. If it wasn;t deliberate, it was lacking in empathy to a dangerous degree.

I despise all men who walk out on women with young children, but I particularly despise him for leaving his children in the care of Plath who was so blatantly seriously mentally ill, and flaunting his affair under her nose. Then to do the same to another woman is simply chilling. He can be a good poet (and sometimes a pompous arse of a poet) but his treatment of them both is despicable. I have no respect for him as a human being.

You know, nothing is stopping from you participating in the debate and actually adding something of substance to the discussion, instead of trying to browbeat another commenter.

Really? Given he was in bed with one of his mistresses when SP killed herself, and moved that mistress into his house only two weeks later, that's quite the wild and unfounded claim.

after her death he certainly seems to have been a good father to them.
@Chickadeeinme - do you really think it is good parenting to leave a lot of their care to a woman you had an affair with, who you refuse to commit to, even though you also have a child with her? I think that exemplifies shit parenting. If he had prioritised his own children over his ego, he would have reassured AW that he was fully committed to her and their child, and created a stable family unit with her.

And not even Assia Wevill, but an entirely different woman with whom he was having a sort of sub-affair from his main affair. (Susan Alliston, a Faber editor and poet, who died the same year as Assia and Shura, but of Hodgkin's Disease, aged only 32.)

Hughes makes it all more fated and doomy than it was by claiming to have spent the night of SP's suicide with SA in the actual bed in which he and SP had spent their wedding night, but in fact it was a different flat SA rented in the same building.)

In fact, it seems that he was such a negligent father that AW believed (rightly or wrongly) that he wouldn't care for their daughter after her death by suicide.

He seems like any other coercive, violent abusive man, who picks on unstable women because they make easy prey. I'm not sure why anyone would try to defend him.

However, she did bite him when they first met, hard enough for him to bear the mark for a few weeks. They were both volatile.

I can only speculate, but yes,I imagine finding out that your separated wife and mother of your children had killed herself, would have affected him.

I'm not defending the man or his behaviour. I'm defending a poet whose work I think will be around and influential for a long time. These two are not the same thing. I specifically criticised his behaviour over Plath's literary legacy.

Really? You think a violent abuser who couldn't stop cheating on the mother of his children, would be grief-stricken by her suicide? Hilarious.

I imagine he found it very incovenient not to have someone to look after the children, though – perhaps that's part of why he moved in his mistress so quickly.

But why defend that poet? Defend the poems by all means. Some are stunning. But the man honks worse than the trout he used to stuff in his jacket pockets.

Right, so you're not defending the man, or his behaviour, but rather...him as a poet? So, his literary works? What specifically, in regards to his poetry, are you defending him from?

What do you think about Assisa Wevill (who was married at the time), starting an affair with Ted Hughes, while he still living with Sylvia Plath and their two children?

I think it's terrible, obviously, as is the fact that she killed her daughter. But then, I'm not trying to defend her.

However you are, it seems, trying to defend a man who was a prolific cheater, and a horrible abuser on top of that – to the point that I've read SP implied he raped her, and caused a miscarriage by beating her?

That's on him. There'd be no hate if he wasn't such a cunt. That's just victim complex.

They had a nanny and domestic help.

This is a brilliant summary and revision for today.

The public hate caused immense damage to their children, which Freida has written about. We don’t know what actually happened between Ted Hughes and SP and AW. (It’s NOT okay to abuse anyone.)

But we do. There's lots of written evidence from her and records of people who were there who have gone on to tell what they saw.