Poet Gunn told Hughes to go public over Plath torment
TED HUGHES was told by his friend and fellow poet Thom Gunn to break his silence on Sylvia Plath for the sake of his own mental health, a previously-unpublished letter reveals.
The poet laureate was vilified by Plath devotees for her suicide in 1963, shortly after he abandoned her for another woman. She became a tragic feminist icon, while he faced accusations from her fans of driving Plath to her death aged just 30.
He refrained from publicly defending himself even when his poetry readings were disrupted by shouts of “murderer!” and his name defaced from her gravestone.
But he sought Gunn’s advice in 1991 on whether to publish a book about his relationship with Plath. In a letter, now among Gunn’s papers in the University of California, Berkeley, Hughes wrote:
“Maybe my long silence has done me no good. What do you think?”
Gunn wrote: “Such a book would be good for the record and also for your own well-being… but it might be best if you did not go overtly on the defensive.”
Hughes eventually took the advice.
In 1998, months before his death, he published a collection of poems, which recounted his love for Plath and torment over her depression. Gunn’s reply to Hughes will appear in a forthcoming book, The Letters of Thom Gunn, to be released by Faber & Faber next month.