Son of poet Sylvia Plath commits suicide

March 23, 2009

The son of poets and  has committed suicide.

hanged himself at his home in, Alaska on March 16, after a long battle with. Hughes was 47 at the time of his death.

Media outlets described the death as another in a long line of tragedy for the family.

Hughes was only one year old when his mother famously gassed herself to death in 1963, soon after her relationship with Ted Hughes ended. In 1969, Ted Hughes' mistress killed herself and their daughter in a copycat suicide.

Nicholas Hughes, who was not married and had no children, was an who studied stream fish. He had been a professor of fisheries and ocean sciences at the until recently, when he he left the post to set up a  at home.

“His lifelong fascination with fish and fishing was a strong and shared bond with our father (many of whose poems were about the natural world)," his sister, Frieda Hughes, said in a statement given to the press.

"He was a loving brother, a loyal friend to those who knew him and, despite the vagaries that life threw at him, he maintained an almost childlike innocence and enthusiasm for the next project or plan," she said.

Near the end of her life, Sylvia Plath wrote poems about Nicholas Hughes, including one entitled "Nick and the Candlestick" from her collection, , which reads: “You are the one/ Solid the spaces lean on, envious./ You are the baby in the barn.”