1.Geoffrey Chaucer
Chaucer's grave in the Abbey provided the nucleus for Poets' Corner but it was not because of his poetry that he was buried there. Ten months before his death in October 1400 Chaucer leased a property in the garden of the Abbey's Lady Chapel and it was almost certainly because he died so close to the Abbey and was a man of consequence beyond his literary work that he was buried in the south transept. It was only in the late sixteenth century when Edmund Spenser was buried close to Chaucer that the concept of a Poets' Corner began.
2.Ben Jonson
Jonson died in a house near the Abbey and was buried upright, standing on his feet, in the northern aisle of the nave. He is supposed to have told the Dean of Westminster that 'six feet long by two feet wide is too much for me: two feet by two feet will do for all I want'. The memorial in Poets' Corner was erected nearly a hundred years after his death but those who wished him to be remembered could not remember how he had usually spelled his name. He appears as 'Johnson' not 'Jonson'.
3.William Shakespeare
Buried in Stratford-on-Avon, Shakespeare has a memorial in Poets' Corner that dates from 1740. He is depicted leaning, slightly awkwardly, on a pile of books with his left hand pointing to a scroll with some lines from The Tempest on it.
4.Lord Byron
According to the Dean of Westminster at the time of Byron's death, the poet's 'open profligacy' was 'an obstacle to his commemoration' and it remained an obstacle until 1969. Even in 1924, the Dean of the day was not sympathetic to an attempt to commemorate the centenary of his death with a memorial in the Abbey, writing with robust morality that 'a man who outraged the laws of our Divine Lord, and whose treatment of women violated the Christian principles of purity and honour, should not be commemorated in Westminster Abbey'.
5.Adam Lindsay Gordon
The only Australian poet to be honoured with a bust in Poets' Corner (one sculpted by the wife of Scott of the Antarctic), Gordon was actually born in the Azores but emigrated to Australia as a young man and all his poetry was written there. He committed suicide in Melbourne, where he is buried, in 1870.
6.Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Tennyson died in 1892 and was laid to rest in the Abbey, between the graves of John Dryden and Robert Browning, after a funeral attended by thousands of mourners. The bust on the pillar nearby was placed there three years later.
7.Thomas Hardy
Hardy died in Dorchester and was cremated there, his ashes then being brought to the Abbey to be buried in Poets' Corner. The story that Hardy's heart, which was removed to be buried separately in the village in which he was born, was stolen by a cat from a biscuit tin on his sister's kitchen table and eaten, is probably apocryphal.
8. Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas died in 1953. The campaign to install a memorial to him in Poets' Corner was begun much later after an unlikely admirer, the former US President Jimmy Carter, expressed his surprise that one wasn't already there. The memorial was finally unveiled in 1982.
+1. Thomas Parr
Not all the people buried or commemorated in Poets' Corner were poets. Thomas Parr, who lived through the reigns of ten monarchs, from Edward IV to Charles I, fathered a child out of wedlock at the age of 100 and is said to have lived to be 152, is buried there. Parr lived most of his many years in Shropshire but was brought to London as a curiosity in 1635. The shock was too much for him and he died a few weeks after arriving. Charles I ordered that he should be buried in the Abbey.
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