Poets' Corner
The Poets' Corner (German: Dichterecke ) refers to a part of the transept of the London church Westminster Abbey , in which many of the most important English (or English-speaking) poets, playwrights and writers are buried.
The origin of the Poets' Corner is the grave of Geoffrey Chaucer , who was buried there in 1400. His current tomb was not erected until 1555. In 1599 Edmund Spenser was buried in close proximity to Chaucer's grave, and so the tradition of the Poets' Corner was established.
Some poets, such as William Shakespeare or Lord Byron , have monuments, busts or memorial plaques dedicated even if they were not buried in Poets' Corner. Often this only happened many decades or even centuries after her death.
Poets buried in Poets' Corner
- Robert Browning
- William Camden
- Thomas Campbell
- Geoffrey Chaucer
- William Congreve
- Abraham Cowley
- William Davenant
- Charles Dickens
- John Dryden
- Adam Fox
- John Gay
- Thomas Hardy (without his heart, which is in the town of Dorchester )
- Rudyard Kipling
- Ben Jonson
- Samuel Johnson
- John Masefield
- Matthew Prior
- Richard Brinsley Sheridan
- Edmund Spenser
- Alfred Tennyson
In addition, the composers Georg Friedrich Händel and Ralph Vaughan Williams , the actors David Garrick and Laurence Olivier as well as Thomas Parr († 1635), who allegedly died at the age of 152 and became famous as an attraction through this claim of age, are buried in Poets' Corner.
Poets who are remembered in Poets' Corner
- Jane Austen
- John Betjeman
- William Blake
- Anne Brontë
- Charlotte Brontë
- Emily Brontë
- Fanny Burney
- Robert Burns
- Lord Byron
- Samuel Butler
- Thomas Stearns Eliot
- Oliver Goldsmith
- Adam Lindsay Gordon
- Thomas Gray
- Gerard Manley Hopkins
- Henry James
- John Keats
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- John Milton
- John Ruskin
- Walter Scott
- William Shakespeare
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
- William Makepeace Thackeray
- Dylan Thomas
- Anthony Trollope
- Oscar Wilde
- William Wordsworth
Coordinates: 51 ° 29 '57 " N , 0 ° 7' 38.5" W.