Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes was one of the greatest of post-war English poets. Although more than his poems, he is famous for being the husband of Sylvia Plath, whose suicide in 1963 turned her into the most potent literary icon of twentieth century, not to say the patron saint of feminism (of the angsty victimhood variety). It also turned Hughes into a callous, brutal and insensitive husband who jailed and tortured his genius wife while sleeping with other women. The publication of Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters in the late nineties, a collection of poems about the their life together, undid most of the damage to his reputation. It soon became the fastest selling book of poetry ever published, but then it hardly had anything to do with poetry. It just showed how entrenched the Plath myth had become in our popular culture.

I am currently reading a biography of Ted Hughes, called simply Ted Hughes: The Life of Poet by Elaine Feinstein. It claims to be an "unbiased" biography written from the point of view of Ted Hughes's literary achievements rather than just his relationship with Plath. Should be an interesting read. I knew that his second wife Assia for whom he left Sylvia also committed suicide but I didn't know that before taking her life she killed their daughter too. I was surprised that I did not know this before. Taking your own life is one thing (an honourable thing I say, but more on that later) but killing your two-year old daughter by giving her sleeping pills with whisky is just too much. I hope the biography has some details about what really happened.

I have been reading some stuff from the internet and refreshing myself with the details of the Hughes-Plath story. I came across some very interesting articles. Specially worth reading are the articles from Salon. Look up the directory for Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes related articles here and here. Specially worth reading are articles on the Plath journals by novelist Kate Moses, who wrote a fictionalized account of the traumatic period of Plath's life before she took her life and composed her masterpiece Ariel. The two parts of the article are here and here. She also speculates that it was perhaps PMS and complex biochemistry which drove or at least contributed to her suicide (must he hard being a woman!). The journal of the period when she wrote the Ariel poems were destroyed by Ted Hughes soon after her death. Ted Hughes also edited and reorganized her poems in Ariel, which some critics claim, he did heavy-handedly, turning the theme of tranformative re-birth into a tale of inevitable self-destruction. He later defended his actions by saying that he wanted to protect his children from all that "sadness". Also worth reading is the moving review of Birthday Letters by Jay Parini (you can find it here). And if you want a different perspective (a feminist one) you can read Katha Pollitt's (one of my favourite woman columnists) review in The New York Times (here).Also the Guardian profiles of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to get to the articles or do a search on the site! Another article from Slate about the biopic which came a few years back on the life of Plath in which Gwyneth Paltrow played the title role. Another article has a very good summary of the whole literary controversy for the beginners. So if you don't know anything about the affair start with that one.