The writer, who was named Poet Laureate of England in 1984, died yesterday.

He stunned the literary world earlier this year with a series of previously unknown impassioned poems to his tragic American poet wife Sylvia Plath, who killed herself in 1963 after their separation.

Days after the publication of birthday letters, Hughes was awarded the 21,000 pounds Whitbread Book Award for the previous year's collection of poems, Tales from Ovid.

He was too ill to attend the ceremony to accept the award.

Among Hughes' works, many of which took an unsentimental look at nature, were -- Crow: From the life and songs of the crow (1971), Moortown (1979, 1989), and River (1984).