One of Britain's most admired literary figures, the Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, has died of cancer at sixty-eight.

His publishers said he'd been fighting the disease for the last eighteen months.

Hughes was acclaimed for the intense images he evoked of the countryside and the animal world.

However, there was controversy over his six-year marriage to the American poet and feminist icon, Sylvia Plath.

Some of her followers blamed Hughes for her later suicide.

But in a volume of verse about Plath last year Hughes revealed an affectionate, sometimes harrowing relationship, at odds with suggestions of cruelty.