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.

It does not. When I did my PhD no women believed it and many of the men pretended to cultivate it. It’s bullshit, really. Everyone has the capacity to feel deeply.

its also a very snobbish and “superior” concept, if you think about it.

Agree with OP. People have their biases and opinions and use SP and TH’s relationship as a case study without sufficient context.
Simplistically yes he was a selfish, arrogant, abusive shit. Typical of powerful men of his time. But I don’t ‘hate’ him and would respect his daughter’s position.
Also not too bothered that he was so vilified. It’s quite gratifying that he didn’t entirely get away with his behaviour. As he would have done before the feminist movement. I often wonder about the forgotten wives of the Great Men of the past. At least SP and her work are remembered.

We will have to agree to differ. A poet like John Keats definitely had a “poet temperament.” He felt things so profoundly,
whether he was experiencing the agony of mortality, the intense beauty of nature, or the desperate, passionate love he held for Fanny Brawne.

Keats wrote an impressive amount of work before dying at the age of 25.

I was stating AW’s reason, but I was not attaching blame to TH for the murder of his child. The blame doesn’t lie solely with him. Both women were extremely unhappy and highly complex.

Maybe the value of his work should be eclipsed or removed by his shitty behaviour. The art and the artist are after all intrinsically linked.

we no longer celebrate many artists (in the broadest sense) based on past behaviour. I am content with that.

Plenty of people feel things profoundly, it’s just they often haven’t written about it.

Exactly. I know a lot of poets — my work brings me into contact with them. They are entirely ordinary, flawed people with a capacity for turning their observations into words in a specific medium, in the same way that some people have a talent for gymnastics or gardening.

It’s the “poet temperament” that’s the primary driver. They have an extreme urge to write poetry.

Whether or not the 'poet temperament' exists, I don't think it can be used to excuse domestic violence or cheating.

Being driven to write poems would've been harmless - it was the philandering and abuse he apparently engaged in when he wasn't writing poems that was the issue. So whether or not he had a 'poet temperament' is irrelevant.

(Also, feeling obsessively driven to do something is just a fixation - it could be music, poetry, writing in general, or some other hobby. It frequently occurs in people with autism, and forms of ADHD.)

We don’t have poets like Keats anymore,(widely considered one of the greatest poets in the English language, and one of my absolute favourites!!) Just like there has never been another Shakespeare. They were extraordinary geniuses with “poet temperament!!”

I think it’s wrong to cancel artists because of past behaviour. Judging past actions by today's moral standards lacks historical empathy. Societal norms and laws were fundamentally different.

"Time, that with this strange excuse,
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel
Pardon him for writing well..."
Auden, re Yeats, from memory so apologies for errors!

Like so many girls of a literary bent, I discovered and became fairly obsessed with SP in my late teens, and have read far less of TH's work, partially as a consequence of taking her side. It sounds simplistic but it's true.

I have studiously and deliberately avoided reading any biographical material on Larkin, who is probably my favourite c20 poet. I know he wasn't a nice man, but I love his work, and I want to be able to continue to do so.

I think we’d be left with very little literature (or indeed art of any variety) if we attached a necessity for moral behaviour by today’s standards to creative expression. Wordsworth abandoned a mistress and a child in France. Dylan Thomas was a drunk, and so were many other poets. Byron was mad, bad and dangerous to know according to his contemporaries and used cruelty as a means of control towards his wife. Larkin was shitty to his mistresses. Shelley abandoned his pregnant wife for 16 year old Mary Godwin. Verlaine shot Rimbaud and went to prison for it. Pound and Eliot werean anti-Semites (as were many writers in the 20s and 30s). Coleridge was a drug addict. Neruda abandoned his wife and his hydrocephalic daughter and left them in poverty. Burns boasted about forcing himself on a girlfriend. Poe was misogynistic and aggressive towards women. Derek Walcott was a sexual harasser and lost a prestigious position because of it. And that’s the tip of a large iceberg, off the top of my head and before we even start on the fiction writers, playwrights, artists and actors.

Very little literature and art by men.

That would be a massive tragedy!!

For centuries, historians believed William Shakespeare permanently deserted his wife, Anne Hathaway, and their three children in Stratford-upon-Avon to pursue his writing and acting career in London. Imagine if Shakespeare was “cancelled!!”

It was nothing as widespread as 'public hate'. Do you realise how few people are interested in poetry? Think of the tiny percentage of the English speaking world who are interested in reading serious fiction, and divide that by a thousand.

TH got heckled at readings, Plath's grave was vandalised to remove 'Hughes' and he was criticised by academics interested in Plath's work for his heavy-handed, self-serving editing and destruction of her work, and, with his sister Olwyn, who took over the Plath estate, for the agenda-led way in which they tried to enforce their vision of Plath and the TH-SP marriage via de-authorising previously authorised biographies, browbeating biographers, refusing permission to quote SP or TH's work to those interpreting the marriage in ways they didn't like etc.

Janet Malcolm's brilliant The Silent Woman is wonderful on this, focusing on biographies and post-mortem mythologising of Plath, and specifically the virtual nervous breakdown experienced by Plath's authorised and best biographer Anne Stevenson, because of her treatment by Olwyn Hughes, who loathed Plath and felt she was protecting her brother and dictated the emphasis of much of the book to the point where AS put a note on the text describing it as a work of dual authoriship. (Neither JM nor AS were allowed to speak to TH, ever.)

TH behaved badly to SP, yes, that's beyond dispute. The awful thing that happened to him is to an extent what happens to all those on difficult terms with someone who dies by suicide -- he never got a change to redo, to make amends. Plath died young, hurt and furious at TH's infidelities, and it froze their relationship there. If she'd lived, they might have reconciled, or divorced, and she might have looked back on it as an unusually bad patch. Readers would view her life and work entirely differently. The difference between TH and other people adjacent to a suicide is that he had to continue to live with this publicly.

On the other hand, let's not get carried away. He did not avoid fame, he led an increasingly high-profile career as a public poet, ending up as Poet Laureate and best mate of Prince Charles.

And let's not forget either, that he benefited financially from the Plath estate. All the money earned by her writings came to him throughout his life. Plus Birthday Letters, his late collection about his marriage to SP was the fastest-selling poetry book in history. He became a rich man. For a poet, he became dazzlingly rich.

When he died, he left his substantial estate, £1.4 million, exclusively to his wife, Carol. Only in a letter, not the will, did he say he would leave the royalties from his own books to be divided between his children by Plath and his sister. Frieda Hughes took Carol to court for years after TH died, saying that the estate had stopped paying the royalties to her. The defence was that Carol had full control of the estate and the letter had no legal validity as it was not in the will.

I'm not saying anyone should be 'cancelled'. I'm just pointing out that realistically speaking, it would be mostly men who bore the brunt of being judged poorly for their behaviour, and only a very few women.

@SinisterPeaches I'm so glad you mentioned Janet Malcolm's book - I've thought for a long time it is one of the best books about writing and writers I've ever read. Must dig it out again.

That's very sad re Frieda having to sue Carol over the royalties. So many people behave so very badly over inheritance.

So Ted Hughes was such a great father, he prevented Plath's children from benefiting financially from their mother's work? What a scumbag.

I was literally just looking for my copy last night, reminded of it by this thread. If anyone interested in Plath or in literary biography in general, hasn't read it, I really recommend it, especially if you read it alongside Anne Stevenson's Bitter Fame, and Plath's poems, fiction, published journals and letters.

Yes, I'm not sure I understand fully how the relationship between Frieda, TH and his wife played out once the children were adults, Frieda has always said he was a loving father to her and Nicholas, but it does seem odd then he left his entire substantial estate to his widow and nothing at all to his two children, apart from a letter with no legal status expressing the wish for his annual income from his royalties to be shared between his children, his sister and his widow (it would have been about £50k each). I'm not sure what was covered in the Jonathan Bate biography from 2015.

Carol announced in 2013 that she was going to write a memoir about their marriage, but it's never appeared, and she's far from a young woman now. Who knows if it ever will?

Maybe the children benefited from family trusts?

Reports at the time said Hughes left his estate to his wife to avoid inheritance tax and left a letter which was not legally enforceable requesting that the income from royalties be shared equally between his wife, sister and children. I found a BBC News report from 2002 (pasted below) that suggests the children did benefit from "substantial six-figure sums" after his death, but that negotiations between them and Hughes' widow broke down.
***

The daughter of poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath is accusing her stepmother of withholding money the former poet laureate wanted her to have.
Hughes, who died of cancer in 1998, left all of his £1.4m estate to his widow, Carol.
His daughter Frieda Hughes, 42, maintains her father left a letter instructing Carol Hughes to share proceeds from his books with his two children and his sister Olwyn.
But Carol Hughes's solicitor Damon Parker rejected the allegations, telling BBC News Online Frieda Hughes's comments were "tendentious and misleading".
"Ted Hughes's two children by his first marriage and his sister have all benefited very considerably from the earnings from his poetry," he added.
Frieda Hughes wrote in the Sunday Telegraph that the dispute had left her "not only without my father, whose loss devastated me, but also without the stepmother whom I had loved, and trusted, as my father did".
'Disconnected'
She said: "I walk into bookshops and see my father's astonishing works on the shelves and have to acknowledge that I now feel they have been disconnected from me."
Frieda Hughes says there is "no prospect" of a resolution
The money earned from the copyright to Hughes's poems could total up to £200,000 a year, the paper claims, before being divided between his relatives.
Six months after he died, Frieda Hughes says she received a cheque based on the calculations of his copyright earnings, but she was later told by Carol Hughes she was not legally bound by her husband's letter.
There had been some negotiations between the two sides, but the situation had reached an "impasse", Ms Hughes said.
"There seems no prospect of any resolution without court proceedings which I, for one, have no wish for," she added, although some "some income" was now being provided for Hughes's sister Olywn.
Frieda Hughes was nearly three when Sylvia Plath committed suicide, and 10 when her father married Carol Hughes in 1970.
She chose the fourth anniversary of her father's death to go public on the dispute.
'Impasse'
Mr Parker told BBC News Online that Ted Hughes's two children from his first marriage and his sister had "each received substantial six-figure sums from the estate since he died four years ago".
"Olwyn Hughes continues to receive 25% of all net royalty payments and another 25% is being informally set aside with the intention of it being shared by his two children in the future. They are all aware of these arrangements."
Mr Parker said Frieda Hughes and her brother Nicholas had been offered consultation in matters regarding their father's copyright, but had chosen "to play no part in the running of the literary estate".
He denied claims had reached an "impasse", claiming Frieda and her brother had pulled out of negotiations to settle the dispute themselves.
Carol Hughes had suffered "totally unacceptable pressure and private vilification by some of those involved in the dispute," he added.

If someone hadn't written the following lines already, it seems they would have had to have been invented.

Man hands on misery to man
It deepens like a coastal shelf...

I do like that poem (This Be The Verse) but what’s it got to do with this thread? TH and SP chose to have two children!!!

Maybe it's a sly tribute to TH being second choice for Poet Laureate after Philip Larkin turned it down?