The late poet laureate Ted Hughes emerged yesterday, six months after his death, as one of the richest British poets this century. He left over £1.4m in his will.
The wealth of his estate, in a profession normally linked with garrets and chronic overdrafts, was largely thanks to the posthumous worldwide sales of Birthday Letters, about his first marriage, to the poet Sylvia Plath. But with his second wife Carol he also owned a handsome Devon farmhouse.
Hughes died of cancer in October, aged 68. His will, published in Somerset, left an estate valued at £1,417,560 gross. His predecessor as laureate, John Betjeman - who was a bigger bestseller in his lifetime - bequeathed only £211,000 gross.
Hughes left everything to Carol, to whom he was married for 28 years. The will did not mention his children by Sylvia Frieda, a successful painter, and Nicholas, a marine scientist, but it is assumed that they benefited from family trusts.
Chris Mead, director of the Poetry Society, said: 'It is unusual for a poet to make money like that. But he was a successful poet for a long time and he seemed to live frugally.'
Controversial to the last, Hughes asked his wife to keep his ashes or to scatter and mark them with a granite memorial in a wild Dartmoor spot, identified yesterday as the centre of a ministry of defence machine gun and mortar firing range for 140 days a year.
This choice was criticised by the Dartmoor national park authority, which said he should have picked a place on the moor edge that was less inconvenient for the army. But it delighted the Dartmoor Preservation Association, which saw it as a ploy by the poet to stop the army firing. From the wording of the will, the association's chief executive, John Bainbridge, yesterday pinpointed the spot as 'the great boggy area around Cranmere Pool' in north Dartmoor, a place of pilgrimage for hikers since the 19th century.
'It is a wonderful spot for a poet's memorial, very very wild moorland and peat bog miles from any road. It's far better than an ugly statue in a town,' Mr Bainbridge said. 'This gives us an identification with an A-class writer which Devon has not had before. We can now claim Ted Hughes as our own.'