Hughes gets place at Poet’s Corner
British poet Ted Hughes, who was married for a short period to American writer Sylvia Plath, was on Tuesday evening honoured with a memorial at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.
Hughes, who died in 1998, was Britain’s poet laureate from 1984 until his death. The memorial, made of Kirkstone green slate, has been designed and carved by Devon stonemason Ronald Parsons.
The Poets’ Corner in South Transept of Westminster Abbey is Britain’s most famous resting place for great writers, playwrights and poets. Literary greats like Chaucer, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, John Dryden, Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Hardy are buried at the Abbey and memorials for W.H. Auden, Matthew Arnold, Jane Austen, Bronte sisters, Lord Byron, Coleridge, Keats, T.S. Eliot are present at the Poets’ Corner.
Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, a friend of Hughes, paid tribute to him at the dedication ceremony attended by over 300 people, including Hughes’ widow Carol and his daughter Frieda Hughes, and poets and writers like Simon Armitage, Blake Morri-son, Sir Andrew Motion, Michael Murpurgo and Graham Swift. Heaney, who unveiled the memorial, said that “a great poet, a great soul now has his proper place and due.” Hughes’ memorial stone is at the foot of the memorial to his mentor T.S. Eliot.
Post new comment