A slab inscribed with poignant lines from a poem by Ted Hughes, uniting in one stone his love of poetry, fishing, and his adopted county, Devon, is to be dedicated in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey.
The lines from his poem That Morning recall a day when he stood deep in an Alaskan stream as a shoal of salmon flickered by: "So we found the end of our journey, So we stood alive in the river of light, Among the creatures of light, creatures of light".
The poet laureate died in 1998, one of the most critically admired and popular poets of the 20th century. Members of his family including his widow, Carol, and Frieda, his daughter with Sylvia Plath, will join friends and fellow poets including the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, former poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Simon Armitage and Blake Morrison, authors Michael Morpurgo and Graham Swift, and others from the arts world.
The slab of Kirkstone green slate was designed by the Devon stonemason Ronald Parsons, and carved as he listened to recordings of Hughes reading his own work. It will be unveiled at the foot of the memorial to TS Eliot – Hughes's mentor and a director of his publisher, Faber and Faber. All the members of a family scarred by tragedy will be recalled in the ceremony. Heaney – who said at Hughes's funeral, "No death outside my immediate family has left me feeling more bereft; no death in my lifetime has hurt poets more" – will give the oration on Tuesday night and read several Hughes poems, including Some Pike for Nicholas, another fishing poem recalling some of his happiest hours with his son, Nicholas, who killed himself in 2009. Plath killed herself in the bitterly cold winter of 1963. Actor Juliet Stevenson will read other poems including Hughes's tender verse about his daughter Full Moon and Little Frieda.
The son immortalised in the poetry of both parents – including the fishing poem now inscribed on the memorial slab, and in Sylvia Plath's Nick and the Candlestick – became an expert on fisheries and ocean science, but killed himself in 2009 after battling depression for years.
Plath's death, when Hughes had an affair and she killed herself in the bitterly cold winter of 1963, cast a long shadow over the rest of his life. Some of her more passionate admirers held him responsible for her death, and the name "Hughes" was repeatedly chiselled off her tomb stone in Yorkshire. He publicly gave his side of the story only in the last year of his life, in the TS Eliot and Forward prize winning anthology Birthday Letters. Her life, and their early happy years together, will be recalled in a letter to Plath which will be read by Lord Evans, former chairman of Faber and Faber.
His memorial in the corner of the South Transept, one of the best loved parts of the abbey for visitors, joins a dazzling assembly of poets, actors and authors, including Shakespeare, Edmund Spencer, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Johnson, and Sir Laurence Olivier. Most are buried elsewhere, and many took centuries to earn their place in the company: the most recently unveiled was to Elizabeth Gaskell who died in 1865. The tradition began almost accidentally: the first poet buried there, Geoffrey Chaucer, won his place not because he wrote the Canterbury Tales but because he was clerk of works to the palace of Westminster.
• This article was amended on 6 December 2011. The original referred to TS Eliot as one of Ted Hughes's predecessors as poet laureate. This has been removed as incorrect.
