But there were no more poetic additions to the transept for two centuries after Chaucer’s death; the next to join him was Edmund Spenser, who died in 1599 and was buried just a few yards away. And so all of a sudden a tradition was born: apparently the South Transept is where you bury your poets.

Over the subsequent centuries the poets buried here have included some of Britain’s most distinguished, Tennyson, Browning, Dryden… And still others who were buried elsewhere received at least a memorial here, from Shakespeare and Milton, through all the major romantic poets – Blake, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Burns – through to some of the giants of the 20th century like TS Eliot and WH Auden, and Laureate John Betjeman.

Poets' Corner at the Abbey
© Dean & Chapter of Westminster Abbey 2003

The non-poets

And though this part of the Abbey has come to be known as "Poets’ Corner", it’s not just poets but all sorts of writers who are buried or commemorated here. An inscription marks the grave of Victorian novelist Charles Dickens (who gets a fresh wreath on the anniversary of his death every year), and not far from him you’ll also find Dr Johnson, Sheridan, Hardy, Kipling and others, and monuments to Jane Austen, to the Brontës, to Walter Scott and Henry James.

(A few non-writers have managed to sneak in to the South Transept too – you can find the grave of George Frederick Handel and a number of former clergymen of the Abbey, and even the grave of Laurence Olivier. You’ll also see the grave of "Old Tom Parr", who was unremarkable but for the fact that he lived to the ripe old age of 152.)

The 18th-century Flemish sculptor Michael Rysbrack was responsible for many of the monuments here, including that of English dramatist and poet Ben Jonson, who is, apparently at his own suggestion, buried upright (in the nave).

Of course, there were some great poets whose scandalous lives meant that they were not seen as fit for commemoration in the Abbey, or at least for whom this commemoration had to wait years – sometimes centuries – after their deaths. Byron, who died in 1824, wasn’t recognised till the 1960s, and by the time the memorial window to Christopher Marlowe was unveiled in 2002, the dramatist had been dead for more than 400 years. Even the relatively virtuous Shakespeare didn't get his monument until 1740.