"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 Hughes’s successor as Poet Laureate, Sir Andrew Motion.To Hughes’s 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 Hughes’s 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."
Even if he was as big as monster as the Plath industry claim--and I am more than willing to believe he was--he is a finer poet than you would ever suspect, especially in the U.S., where is reputation is pretty much nil. I read Birthday Letters while at Oxford and it was a revelation (especially "Paris" and "Your Spain" and "Caryatids"). I am not going to say, as some people said at the time, that it goes toward redeeming his relationship with Plath, but I will say that is the work of a first-rate poet. RECOGNIZE.
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