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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 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.
1 People buried in Poets' Corner
- Geoffrey Chaucer
- Edmund Spenser
- William Camden
- Thomas Parr
- William Davenant
- Abraham Cowley
- John Dryden
- Matthew Prior
- William Congreve
- George Frederick Handel
- David GarrickDavid Garrick ( February 19, 1717 January 20, 1779) was an English actor, dramatist and theatre manager, and a pupil and friend of Dr. David Garrick was born in Hereford, England and educated, like Johnson, at Lichfield. Johnson later taught him the class
- Samuel JohnsonDr Samuel Johnson ( September 18, 1709 December 13, 1784), often referred to simply as Dr Johnson was one of England's greatest literary figures: a critic, poet, essayist, biographer and lexicographer whose bon mots are still frequently quoted in print to
- Richard Brinsley SheridanRichard Brinsley Sheridan ( October 30, 1751 July 7, 1816) was an Irish playwright and politician. Sheridan was baptized in Dublin on November 4, 1751, his father Thomas being an actor-manager who managed the Theatre Royal, Dublin for a time, and his moth
- Thomas CampbellThomas Campbell ( July 27, 1777 June 15, 1844) was a Scottish poet. He was born in Glasgow, the eighth son of Alexander Campbell, His father, of the family of Campbell of Kirnan, Argyllshire, belonged to a Glasgow firm trading in Virginia, and lost his mo
- Charles DickensCharles John Huffam Dickens ( February 7, 1812 June 9, 1870), pen-name " Boz", was an English novelist of the Victorian era. The popularity of his books during his lifetime and to the present is demonstrated by the fact that none of his novels has ever go
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson
- Robert Browning
- Thomas Hardy
- Rudyard Kipling
- John Masefield
- Laurence Olivier
- John Gay
2 People commemorated with memorials in Poets' Corner
