The South Transept is lit by a large rose window and one of the best known parts of Westminster Abbey, Poets' Corner can be found here. It was not originally designated as the burial place of writers, playwrights and poets.
The first poet to be buried here, Geoffrey Chaucer, was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey because he had been Clerk of Works to the palace of Westminster, not because he had written the Canterbury Tales. Over 150 years later, during the flowering of English literature in the sixteenth century, a more magnificent tomb was erected to Chaucer and in 1599 Edmund Spenser was laid to rest nearby. These two tombs began a tradition which developed over succeeding centuries. Shakespeare, buried at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1616, had to wait until 1740 before a monument appeared in Poets' Corner.
Poets
-Lord Byron
-John Dryden
-Tennyson
-Robert Browning
-John Masefield.
Writers:
-William Camden
-Dr. Samuel Johnson
-Charles Dickens
-Richard Brinsley Sheridan
-Rudyard Kipling
-Thomas Hardy
Not all those buried in the South Transept are poets or writers. Several of Westminster's former Deans and Canons lie here. Also buried here is Thomas Parr, who was said to have died at the age of 152 in 1635 after having seen ten sovereigns on the throne during his long life.
