Aug 07 2001
The weasel poet
Sorry, Ted, I ain’t buying it. Ted Hughes, the late Poet Laureate and former husband of the still-fascinating poet, Sylvia Plath, is still trying to justify his swinish behavior from beyond the grave. In a letter to a friend, Hughes claims that Plath killed herself due to a bad reaction to anti-depressants. Now, no-one is saying that Sylvia was the most stable person in the world. She had attempted suicide before even meeting Hughes, and like many geniuses, was haunted by demons. But let’s face it — it was Ted’s abandoning Sylvia and her two young children in a strange country for another woman that led her to put herself out of her misery on that cold February day at the age of 30.
Since Ted and Sylvia were still married at the time of her suicide, he inherited all her copyrights, thus gaining from the death he had caused. Oddly, the woman with whom he was having the affair which precipitated Sylvia’s suicide killed herself and her child in the very same way as Sylvia had only a few years before: by putting their heads in the gas oven.
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