London - The only son of late British poet Ted Hughes and his American wife, Sylvia Plath, has committed suicide at his home in Alaska, the London Times newspaper reported Monday.

Nicholas Hughes, 47, had been battling depression for some years, his sister, Frieda, was quoted by the paper as saying.

The death adds a further tragic chapter to the sad life story of Hughes and Plath, who gassed herself aged 30 in the couple's London flat when Nicholas and Frieda were young children.

Hughes, who was devastated by her death, died of cancer in 1998.

The Times said Nicholas Hughes was unmarried with no children of his own and had until recently been a professor of fisheries and ocean sciences at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Although he was only a baby when his mother died, Plath had already sketched out what her son meant to her in one of her late poems.

In Nick and the Candlestick, published in her posthumous collection Ariel, she wrote: "You are the one/ Solid the spaces lean on, envious./ You are the baby in the barn."

Later, Hughes wrote of how, after Plath's death, their son's eyes "Became wet jewels,/ The hardest substance of the purest pain/ As I fed him in his high white chair."

Neither he, nor his sister, nor Hughes, could ever fully escape the shadow cast by Plath's suicide in 1963 and the personality cult that then sprang up around her memory, said The Times. (dpa)