Hughes on Plath's final hours...

It is one of the most famous literary relationships, and now a poem in which Ted Hughes describes the night his first wife Sylvia Plath took her own life in 1963, has been published for the first time. Beginning with 'What happened that night? Your final night', 'Last Letter' details the events of Plath's final weekend. The poem was discovered by the guest editor of the 'New Statesman' Melvyn Bragg, who was directed to the piece by Hughes' second wife Carol.

Religious approval for Hughes?...

Poet Ted Hughes may be honoured with a plaque in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner. The Dean of Westminster said that he had received a number of letters persuading him to the cause; a cause supported by fellow poets Seamus Heaney and Andrew Motion. A former Poet Laureate, Hughes is best known for his marriage to Sylvia Plath, whose subsequent suicide in 1963 shocked the literary world. If selected for a plaque, Hughes would be the first since the man he succeeded as Poet Laureate in 1984, John Betjeman; and would join the likes of Thomas Hardy, William Blake and T.S. Eliot. Hughes died in 1998, and is described by Heaney as 'one of the vital presences in 20th century poetry.'

On this day...

The American poet and prose writer Sylvia Plath was born, in 1932. Born in Massachusetts, she attended Cambridge University, and it was there that she met and married poet Ted Hughes, a later Poet Laureate. She is known as one of the main contributors to the genre of confessional poetry - in which the poem shares intimate details surrounding the poet's life. Although famous for her poetry, perhaps her best known work is in prose - the semi-autobiographical 'The Bell Jar' written under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. After numerous suicide attempts, many initiated by her husband's affair, she finally succeeded in February 1963; dying at the age of 30.