And here you come, with a cup of tea Wreathed in steam. The blood jet is poetry, There is no stopping it. You hand me two children, two roses.
from "Kindness", written February 1, 1963. Ariel
As Hughes and Plath were legally married at the time of her death, Hughes inherited the Plath estate, including all her written work. He has been condemned repeatedly for burning Plath's last journal, saying he "did not want her children to have to read it".[79] Hughes lost another journal and an unfinished novel, and instructed that a collection of Plath's papers and journals should not be released until 2013.[79][80] He has been accused of attempting to control the estate for his own ends, although royalties from Plath's poetry were placed into a trust account for their two children, Frieda and Nicholas.[81][82]
Plath's gravestone has been repeatedly vandalized by those aggrieved that "Hughes" is written on the stone; they have attempted to chisel it off, leaving only the name "Sylvia Plath".[83] When Hughes' mistress Assia Wevill died by suicide and killed their four-year-old daughter Shura in 1969, this practice intensified. After each defacement, Hughes had the damaged stone removed, sometimes leaving the site unmarked during repair.[84] Outraged mourners accused Hughes in the media of dishonouring her name by removing the stone.[85] Wevill's death led to claims that Hughes had been abusive to both Plath and Wevill.[86][47]
Radical feminist poet Robin Morgan published the poem "Arraignment", in which she openly accused Hughes of the battery and murder of Plath. Her book Monster (1972) "included a piece in which a gang of Plath aficionados are imagined castrating Hughes, stuffing his penis into his mouth and then blowing out his brains".[87][85][88] Hughes threatened to sue Morgan. The book was withdrawn by the publisher Random House, but it remained in circulation among feminists.[89] Other feminists threatened to kill Hughes in Plath's name and pursue a conviction for murder.[43][87] Plath's poem "The Jailor", in which the speaker condemns her husband's brutality, was included in Morgan's 1970 anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement.[90]
In 1989, with Hughes under public attack, a battle raged in the letters pages of The Guardian and The Independent. In The Guardian on April 20, 1989, Hughes wrote the article "The Place Where Sylvia Plath Should Rest in Peace": "In the years soon after [Plath's] death, when scholars approached me, I tried to take their apparently serious concern for the truth about Sylvia Plath seriously. But I learned my lesson early...If I tried too hard to tell them exactly how something happened, in the hope of correcting some fantasy, I was quite likely to be accused of trying to suppress Free Speech. In general, my refusal to have anything to do with the Plath Fantasia has been regarded as an attempt to suppress Free Speech...The Fantasia about Sylvia Plath is more needed than the facts. Where that leaves respect for the truth of her life (and of mine), or for her memory, or for the literary tradition, I do not know."[85][91]
Still the subject of speculation and opprobrium in 1998, Hughes published Birthday Letters that year, his own collection of 88 poems about his relationship with Plath. Hughes had published very little about his experience of the marriage and Plath's suicide, and the book caused a sensation, being taken as his first explicit disclosure, and it topped bestseller charts. It was not known at the volume's release that Hughes had terminal cancer and would die later that year. The book won the Forward Poetry Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, and the Whitbread Poetry Prize. The poems, written after Plath's death, in some cases long after, try to find a reason why Plath took her own life.[92]
In October 2015, the BBC Two documentary Ted Hughes: Stronger Than Death examined Hughes' life and work; it included audio recordings of Plath reciting her own poetry. Their daughter Frieda spoke for the first time about her mother and father.[93]
