Ted Hughes to stick on the good and the shameful in Poets Corner

Ben Hoyle, Arts Correspondent & , : {}

Ted Hughes is to receive a permanent memorial in Poets Corner at Westminster Abbey.

The honour, which was announced yesterday, is the result of a campaign led by Seamus Heaney and Hughess successor as Poet Laureate, Sir Andrew Motion.

To Hughess many supporters it is absolutely right that his distinctive, muscular and prophetic voice should now be remembered in the Abbey, alongside great names of British literature from Chaucer and Shakespeare and Keats to Eliot and Auden.

To the detractors who ensured that Hughess private life overshadowed his poetry for many years, the more appropriate parallels might be Byron or Ben Jonson, great writers who lived lives dogged by scandal and are also commemorated in the Abbey.

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There is no automatic qualification for a place in Poets Corner, nor does admission involve any moral judgment on an individuals character.

The Abbey describes it as a reactive process. Outstanding individuals are nominated and the Dean, currently the Very Reverend John Hall, takes soundings from academics, critics and the nominees peers about their significance in their field.

Dr Hall said: Deciding within a few years of peoples death that they will be remembered in hundreds of years time is, of course, impossible. And yet, it is sometimes right to make such a decision, as deans have done over the centuries.

By no means every poet laureate has been commemorated in Poets Corner. But the overwhelming weight of advice I have received suggests that this is the right decision.

Hughess memorial will be placed in the south transept, popularly known as Poets Corner, probably next year.

He will be commemorated with a floor stone or a wall plaque. His ashes, which he asked his widow, Carol, to scatter at a remote spot on his beloved Dartmoor, will not be reinterred there.

Mrs Hughes said that she was thrilled that something of his colossal presence will haunt the aisles of Westminster Abbey.

Hughes, who was born in Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire, in 1930, was Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death in 1998.

He won early, precocious acclaim with his first book of poems, The Hawk In The Rain, in 1957 and, over the next 41 years, he wrote nearly 90 books, winning numerous prizes.

However, for much of that time his reputation was inexorably entangled with his private life. Sylvia Plath, whom he married in 1956, gassed herself in 1963. For the rest of his life Hughes was hounded by feminists and Plath devotees who accused him of driving her to her death by his infidelity.

In 1969 he suffered another terrible loss when Assia Wevill, the woman for whom he had left Plath, gassed herself and their daughter in an apparent copycat suicide.

Since his death Hughess reputation has finally outstripped his harrowing biography.

Michael Morpurgo, the childrens writer, said: His private life was his own affair and his poetry will long outlive all that. He will be remembered for the force of his language, which Im sure will ring long and loud through the decades and the centuries.

Sir Andrew said that the reappraisal of Hughess work began in the last five years of his life, with the publication of Tales From Ovid and Birthday Letters, a volume of exquisite poems written over 30 years that contained Hughess long-hidden reflections on his relationship with Plath.

Both books won the Whitbread Book Of The Year prize. The other development was the recognition that Hughes was not so much a nature poet as he had been called, slightly disparagingly, as a poet of the environment who was far ahead of his time. The vast body of work that he produced engaging with the natural world constitutes a gigantic, incipient elegy for what we might lose.

Hughes"s arrival in Poets Corner will stoke up a new controversy around the poet: how good was he compared with the illustrious company that he will keep there?

Sir Andrew said that there was still a tremendous sense of work still to be discovered with Hughes because so much of his work has not been properly studied yet. However, if his reputation continues to advance at the present trajectory, hes a very big poet indeed; one of the very small handful of great British writers of the past hundred years.