Nicholas Hughes, the Son of Sylvia Plath commited suicide
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Nicholas Hughes, the son of the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath had took his own life after the 46th years of his mother's suicide, when she gassed herself while he was sleeping.
He was actually, hanged himself in his house of Alaska. He committed this suicide after battling against depression for days, according to his his sister Frieda said yesterday.
He was unmarried with no children, and was 47 of age... He was even, recently been a professor of fisheries and ocean sciences in the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
The Death of Dr Hughes’s adds a further tragic chapter to his family history.
Sylvia Plath, Phtograph Source: Guardian.co.uk
Telegraph Uk Source...
He was only a baby when his mother died but she had already sketched out what he meant to her in one of her late poems.In Nick and the Candlestick, published in her posthumous collection Ariel, she wrote: “You are the one/ Solid the spaces lean on, envious./ You are the baby in the barn.”
Later his father wrote of how, after Plath’s death, their son’s eyes “Became wet jewels,/ The hardest substance of the purest pain/ As I fed him in his high white chair”. Neither he, nor his sister nor their Poet Laureate father could ever fully escape the shadow cast by Plath’s suicide in 1963 and the personality cult that then sprang up around her memory.
Guardian.co.uk Source"It is with profound sorrow that I must announce the death of my brother, Nicholas Hughes, who died by his own hand on Monday, March 16 ... He had been battling depression for some time," Hughes said in a statement to the newspaper. Source: reuters UK
Yet the "curse" idea is repellent. Repellent to those afflicted with depression; repellent to those whose friends or family have been so burdened; even repellent to lovers of poetry. Sylvia Plath killed herself after many years of psychological instability - she had attempted suicide in her teens, had undergone ECT. Her marriage had broken down, she was living with two small children through one of the coldest winters for decades. Like all too many others, before and after, in a desperate moment, she killed herself, having first carefully set out bread and milk for her two toddlers in their cots. That she had just written some of the great poems of the twentieth century is neither here nor there. She was a great poet, and a depressed person. She was not a great poet because she was depressed; she was not depressed because she was a great poet.
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