His rugged features always looked as if they had been chiselled out of Yorkshire rock, and now real chiselling will etch out Ted Hughes's place in Poets' Corner. His commemoration alongside the likes of Wordsworth in Westminster Abbey may lift the long shadow cast over his reputation by the suicides of both his first wife, Sylvia Plath, and his subsequent partner. As the pall fades, the sheer power of Hughes's talent can be enjoyed afresh, and without distraction. While shunning the snooty ways of the modernists of his youth, Hughes nonetheless took on themes that were just as big, the difference being that he also made them accessible, often by putting them in animal form. Thus the thrushes with the "dark, deadly eye, those delicate legs", who are "nothing but a bounce and a stab and a ravening second" are an arresting starting point for asking why human beings are condemned to be something beyond what they do. The "natty get-up" of A March Calf is graphic enough to draw children in, but the real point for Hughes is that, despite the butchery awaiting the creature, while he lives his vitality ensures that death shall have no dominion within him. And how different, by implication, that makes the calf from urbane folk who have lost all connection to their own inner world and the physical world that surrounds them. Seamus Heaney described Hughes as "a great arch under which the least of poetry's children could enter and feel secure". Now his own reputation can rest securely under the abbey's great arches.