Poets’ Corner

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 it is said 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 who maintained a scandalous lifestyle, died in 1824 but was not given a memorial until 1969. Even William Shakespeare, buried at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1616, was not honoured with a monument until 1740 when one designed by William Kent was constructed in Poets' Corner.

Not all poets appreciated memorialisation and Samuel Wesley's epitaph for Samuel Butler, who supposedly died in poverty, continued Butler's satiric tone:

:While Butler, needy wretch, was yet alive, :No generous patron would a dinner give; :See him, when starv'd to death, and turn'd to dust, :Presented with a monumental bust. :The poet's fate is here in emblem shown, :He ask'd for bread, and he received a stone.

People buried in Poets' Corner

* Robert Adam
* Robert Browning
* William Camden
* Thomas Campbell
* Geoffrey Chaucer
* William Congreve
* Abraham Cowley
* William Davenant
* Charles Dickens
* Adam Fox
* John Dryden
* David Garrick
* John Gay
* George Friedrich Handel
* Thomas Hardy
* Dr Samuel Johnson
* Ben Jonson
* Rudyard Kipling
* Thomas Macaulay
* John Masefield
* Anne Oldfield
* Laurence Olivier, Baron Olivier
* Thomas Parr
* Matthew Prior
* Charles de Saint-Évremond
* Richard Brinsley Sheridan
* Edmund Spenser
* Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson

People commemorated with memorials in Poets' Corner

* Dame Peggy Ashcroft
* Jane Austen
* Richard Aldington
* John Betjeman
* Laurence Binyon
* William Blake
* Edmund Blunden
* Charlotte Brontë
* Anne Brontë
* Emily Brontë
* Rupert Brooke
* Fanny Burney
* Robert Burns
* Samuel Butler
* Lord Byron
* Charles Lutwidge Dodgson/Lewis Carroll
* Noel Coward
* Mary Ann Evans/George Eliot
* Thomas Stearns Eliot
* Wilfrid Gibson
* Oliver Goldsmith
* Adam Lindsay Gordon
* Robert Graves
* Thomas Gray
* Julian Grenfell
* Ivor Gurney
* Robert Herrick
* Gerard Manley Hopkins
* Alfred Edward Housman
* Henry James
* David Jones
* John Keats
* Jenny Lind
* Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
* Christopher Marlowe
* John Milton
* Robert Nichols
* Wilfred Owen
* Herbert Read
* Isaac Rosenberg
* John Ruskin
* Siegfried Sassoon
* Walter Scott
* William Shakespeare
* Percy Bysshe Shelley
* Charles Sorley
* William Makepeace Thackeray
* Dylan Thomas
* Edward Thomas
* Anthony Trollope
* Oscar Wilde
* William Wordsworth

Other Poets' Graves

Information about the last resting places of other famous poets can be found at:

* Poets' Graves
* Find a Grave