Poets' Corner
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Poets' Corner is the name traditionally given to a section of the South Transept of Westminster Abbey due to the number of poets, playwrights and writers now buried and commemorated there.
The first person to be interred there was Geoffrey Chaucer, whose burial in the abbey owed more to his position as Clerk of Works of the Palace of Westminster than to his fame as a writer. However, the erection of a magnificent tomb by Nicholas Brigham to Chaucer in the middle of the sixteenth century and the nearby burial of Edmund Spenser in 1599 started a tradition that is still upheld, although the area also houses the tombs of several Canons and Deans of the abbey. Also buried here is Thomas Parr, who reportedly died at the age of 152 in 1635 after having seen ten sovereigns on the throne.
Burial or commemoration in the Abbey did not always occur at or soon after the time of death. Lord Byron, for example, whose poetry was admired but maintained a scandalous lifesytle, died in 1824 but was not given a memorial until 1969. Even William Shakespeare, buried at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1616, was not honored with a monument until 1740 when one designed by William Kent was constructed in Poets' Corner.
People buried in Poets' Corner
- Robert Adam
- Robert Browning
- William Camden
- Thomas Campbell
- Geoffrey Chaucer
- William Congreve
- Abraham Cowley
- William Davenant
- Charles Dickens
- John Dryden
- David Garrick
- John Gay
- George Frederick Handel
- Thomas Hardy
- Dr Samuel Johnson
- Rudyard Kipling
- Thomas Macaulay
- John Masefield
- Laurence Olivier, Baron Olivier
- Thomas Parr
- Matthew Prior
- Richard Brinsley Sheridan
- Edmund Spenser
- Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson
People commemorated with memorials in Poets' Corner
- Jane Austen
- John Betjeman
- William Blake
- Charlotte Brontė
- Anne Brontė
- Emily Brontė
- Fanny Burney
- Robert Burns
- Samuel Butler
- Lord Byron
- Thomas Stearns Eliot
- Oliver Goldsmith
- Adam Lindsay Gordon
- Thomas Gray
- Robert Herrick
- Gerard Manley Hopkins
- Alfred Edward Housman
- Henry James
- John Keats
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- Christopher Marlowe
- John Milton
- John Ruskin
- Walter Scott
- William Shakespeare
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
- Oscar Wilde
- William Wordsworth