Caseyelan
03-23-2009, 08:45 AM
http://news.aol.com/article/poet-sylvia-plath-son-suicide/393267
FAIRBANKS, Alaska (March 23) - Nicholas Hughes, the son of poet Sylvia Plath, has killed himself, 46 years after his mother committed suicide and almost 40 years to the day after his stepmother, Assia Wevill, did the same. He was 47.
Hughes, who was not married and had no children, hanged himself at his home March 16, Alaska State Troopers said. An evolutionary biologist, he spent more than a decade on the faculty of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Marmian Grimes, the university's senior public information officer, said he left about a year ago.
Hughes' older sister, poet Frieda Hughes, issued a statement through the Times of London, expressing her "profound sorrow" and saying that he "had been battling depression for some time."
Nicholas Hughes was only 9 months old when his parents, Plath and poet Ted Hughes, separated, and still an infant when his mother died in February 1963. A few months earlier, she had written of Nicholas: "You are the one/Solid the spaces lean on, envious/You are the baby in the barn."
Not widely known when she died, Plath became a cult figure and feminist martyr through the novel "The Bell Jar," which told of a suicidal young woman, and through the "Ariel" poems she had been working on near the end of her life.
FAIRBANKS, Alaska (March 23) - Nicholas Hughes, the son of poet Sylvia Plath, has killed himself, 46 years after his mother committed suicide and almost 40 years to the day after his stepmother, Assia Wevill, did the same. He was 47.
Hughes, who was not married and had no children, hanged himself at his home March 16, Alaska State Troopers said. An evolutionary biologist, he spent more than a decade on the faculty of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Marmian Grimes, the university's senior public information officer, said he left about a year ago.
Hughes' older sister, poet Frieda Hughes, issued a statement through the Times of London, expressing her "profound sorrow" and saying that he "had been battling depression for some time."
Nicholas Hughes was only 9 months old when his parents, Plath and poet Ted Hughes, separated, and still an infant when his mother died in February 1963. A few months earlier, she had written of Nicholas: "You are the one/Solid the spaces lean on, envious/You are the baby in the barn."
Not widely known when she died, Plath became a cult figure and feminist martyr through the novel "The Bell Jar," which told of a suicidal young woman, and through the "Ariel" poems she had been working on near the end of her life.