Heaney calls for poet Hughes to be honoured

Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney has called for Ted Hughes to be honoured in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey.

Irish poet Heaney called Hughes, the former poet laureate, “one of the vital presences in 20th Century poetry”.

He has led calls for the Dean of Westminster to honour Hughes with a plaque at Poets’ Corner.

William Blake, TS Eliot, Wilfred Owen and Edmund Spenser are already honoured at Westminster Abbey.

Hughes would be the first poet to be selected for a plaque since John Betjeman, whom he succeeded as laureate in 1984.

Heaney told the Evening Standard: “Ted Hughes deserves to be in Poets’ Corner because he was a visionary poet with a high sense of his calling and high achievement in his art.

“When he began to write, he had a deep sense of himself as the inheritor and guardian of the land and language of William Blake and William Shakespeare.”

He added: “In proclaiming and embodying in his work a holistic sense of life on earth, he became one of the vital presences in 20th Century poetry.”

Andrew Motion, who took over from Hughes as poet laureate, Lord Melvyn Bragg and a number of academics have joined the call to give Hughes a place at Poets’ Corner.

There is no suggestion that Hughes, who died of cancer in 1998, aged 68, would have his ashes re-interred at the Abbey.

The poet, whose writer wife Sylvia Plath killed herself in 1963, was cremated in Exeter following a service in his home village of North Tawton in Devon.

A spokeswoman for the Dean of Westminster, the Very Reverend Dr John Hall, said the request was being looked at.

“A number of letters have been received and the request is being considered,” she said.