I don't care for Ted Hughes, but I absolutely adore Sylvia Plath and I want to read everything that has to do with her.

and by the way Newstatesman, i don't mind your thinking of posting a super thread of of your idea of a super poet, but deleting comments is quite David Cameron on youtube DavidCamerononline. If I see this performance of shit again, it might make be annoyed.

But I am puzzled.

...but not to leave you, you are me. torys are not, no matter how they want me, especially shoving their sexy blonde wooman towards my cock,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JD4Qz51CWR4

A selfish, self-involved, self-indulgent navel-gazer with daddy issues offed herself leaving her kids without a mother because the world revolved around her and it wasn't paying enough attention for her liking. Really, is there anything more to know...

ok, so Linda watered down her hair from this perfectly lovely display from her distant grandmother, in a local celtic carnival, several hundred years ago, 1980s..., maybe,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7movKfyTBII

The talented, fantastic woman that Sylvia Plath was, Ted's wife, needed Ted's help and he didn't help her.
It would have been better of him had he included this poem in Birthday Letters because out of all, it's the only one that shows him up honestly for the weak, irresponsible man that he was. I think it's awful that they ever met one another - Sylvia's relationship with her father was complex enough and she needed a man by her side who would be a support and aid to her, someone who could also, believe in and help her grow as a poet.Ted was none of those things because he first, eclipsed her with his poetry and then betrayed her.
And then was too much of a coward to tell people just to what extent he betrayed her.

Why critasize both extremely talented people when we should be sympathising with hughes' sadness and enjoying his works, and of course Plath's works.

*severe

I just read the poem, and I'm not sure it reveals much of anything except a poetic expression of confusion, helplessness, and irony. Perhaps I need to read it more carefully. I presume that "Susan" is a name for Assia, the woman Ted Hughes was involved with when he left Plath. That he had kept his old flat and slept with Assia the night of or before Plath's suicide in the same bed he and Plath had spent their wedding night is rather ghastly, on the face of it. But that's the way things happen. Obviously, Assia was merely the "transition" relationship (unfortunately for her). I suspect that Ted was essentially kicked out of their rural cottage when Plath found out about his affair, and went, because he had laid the groundwork for someone to flee to, and because Plath was impossible to live with after she knew, and probably before as well. I don't think it's a great poem, but it's a long one. It also seems to reveal that there was a third suicide, that of Helen, owner of an overprotective Alsatian dog. Helen is mentioned in the Unabridged Journals. Here is a link to something I found about Assia and the weeks right after Plath's death: http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/1999/apr/23/features11.g21

They both were great poets. It is wrong that TH should be blamed for SP's suicide. The way he bore everything all these decades I think he was a very likeable and respect worthy man. He suffered greatly at the hands of people who judged him who had not an iota of an idea what kind of man he really was. These people remind me of the frightful sheep in George Orwell's Animal Farm.
SP had already tried to kill herself as we all know.
About fifty percent of the marriages in the US is said to fail. Some people may kill themselves when a relationship doesn't work. But you can't blame the other spouse for that.
Besides, you and I don't know what was really happening in their house. For example, you and I don't know if SP herself was not sleeping around too.

Oh bloody hell. The bastard is dead and yet he's STILL milking it.

For all who think he was the greatest poet ever, boo-hoo, boo-ho.. two women died because of him.
And yes. That's an evil feminist saying that.

Ted Hughes was obviously in bed with Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot that fateful night—working on his next book for Faber.

It is so amazing how powerful poetry can be. Years after their deaths we are still provoked by Ted's and Sylvia's story. This last letter is not putting it to rest. As long as information from the archives is still being released we will continue to debate. The sooner this information is released to the public the sooner we will accept this beautiful drama.

Notice the old woodwork, pissing their various oils out of their trunk, precious to them and only.

One feels to tell them and fuck off, until their influence does not, whoo, act like a fool.

tidy, self indulgent irish catholic agreement, tidy.

I too have read the poem and its like a box of secrets... Plath wrote Hughes a last letter which was so explosive to him that he compares it to ECT... He claims that if he hadnt been able to see her it would have rearranged his brain for the rest of his life. But he gets it in time and goes to see her, and she greets him in tears that he doesnt understand (does she want his forgivemness?), and then she 'calmly' burns the letter itself. He leaves and spends the weekend with Susan Alliston, even sleeping with her in the same bed that he had slept in with Plath on their wedding night...

So what was it in the letter that was so distressing to him? Ive wondered about this. Was it a) the news that she loved him, or b) the news that she would take a terrible revenge on him? Surely its the second...

But they have a kind of pact of secrecy, in which the lives of their children are bound up... there are two people who will be unable not to choose infidelity and mutual misunderstanding as a future subject of their work... but how far will they go in what they choose to say? It seems that there is an agreement that each will say nothing about the other.

It also seems that the act of burning the letter is a way of saying that their marriage is utterly finished and that each is free, and the poem bears this out because Hughes then goes through a weekend of funeral rites for it, but somehow free to do this.

What a chinese box of a poem, with a mystery in the middle, and a mystery reduced to ashes.

It reminds me of a poem by a real genius, Dane Zajc, called 'solitude encounters' which ends 'since what is ash but disintegrated solitude...'. I know for a fact that Ted Hughes knew this poem and deeply admired it.

What I find distressing in the whole affair, however, is the absence of their children, and their absence in his frame of reference.

its an exposure, like he says, framing a secret. Ah, the allure of the Plath/Hughes story...

Any further thoughts?

NewStatesman, are there braincelless, SE lesser school educated decendents involed with this post? Becuae it bloody well seems so. Or worse, friends?

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What a fascinating sequence of comments. Believe it or not, I just finished reading The Bell Jar this morning and then I spotted the article about the poem in today's Seattle Times. What a coincidence. Now I am avidly reading further.
My reading of The Bell Jar is long overdue. Little did I realize that Sylvia was in fact almost my contemporary - growing up in Boston, attending college in New England, going to work in a big city.

A lot of you are blaming Hughes for her suicide, but if you look back at her past, she'd attempted it a few times before then, even before Hughes when she took the sleeping pills. Yes I believe Hughes leaving her was a reason which led to the collapse in the fight against depression, but I also think that there was a high chance of her killing herself anyway just given her past. Just look at her poem 'Lady Lazarus'.

That said I believe they were both outstanding poets, and the only thing that vilifying either of them does is make it harder for the people who knew and loved them. Check out 'Readers' by Frieda Hughes

I think that it's a bit hilarious to say that Hughes was one of the greatest poets ever - what a joke that is. He was middling at best in my view; this attempt at a poem mostly just shows his own ego and self-absorption. Also, he may or may not have grieved over Sylvia Plath, but he clearly did not help her in her time of need. She was clinically depressed and he could have helped her. He and his supporters seem endlessly determined to justify his poor behavior. I'd say it's saddest that several women killed themselves over him.

A lot of the discussion surrounding "Ted and Sylvia" is a hybrid of conjecture, speculation, popular romanticizing and gossip, plain and simple. A lot of it also belongs to radical feminism versus the response of the political right. Be wary about taking a poet's autobiography at face value. My take on Ted Hughes' poem is that the details of what happened that night are still hidden.

A fragment of Hugh's last Peom found in a Best of Men Only by Melyvn Bragg.

The bitch croaked
and people think I am a joke
Even farkin Larkin is dark
Like a croakin crow in the park.

Five Leaves Publications (www.fiveleaves.co.uk) has published Susan Alliston's "Poems and Journals 1960-1969" under the Richard Hollis imprint. The book includes an introduction by Ted Hughes, written in 1970.

such a clattering of nonsense and personal agendas.
what a poem. so overwhelming, so distressing, and so in need of further listening, further reading, and thought.
the rest is, and should be, silence.