Poets Corner
Westminster church is a gothic church in central London, officially the Collegiate Church of St Peter. It was built from 1050 to 1745 and consecrated under Edward the Confessor in 1065. The west towers are by Nicholas Hawksmoor, completed after his death in 1745. Since William I nearly all English monarchs have been crowned in the abbey, and several are buried here. Some 30 scientists, among them Isaac Newton and James Prescott, are interred or commemorated here, and many poets at Poets Corner. In the centre of the nave is the tomb of an ‘Unknown Warrior’ of World War I.
According to tradition, a shrine was first founded here in 616 on a site then known as Thorney Island. It was said to have been miraculously consecrated after a fisherman on the River Thames saw a vision of Saint Peter. Its construction originated in Edward’s failure to keep a vow to go on a pilgrimage; the Pope suggested that he redeem himself by building an Abbey.
The original Abbey, in the Romanesque style that is called Norman in England, was built to house Benedictine monks. It was rebuilt in the Gothic style between 1245-1517.
Poets Corner is in the South Transept. 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.
Lord Byron, whose lifestyle caused a scandal although his poetry was much admired, died in 1824 but was finally given a memorial only in 1969.
Even Shakespeare, buried at Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire in 1616, had to wait until 1740 before a monument, designed by William Kent, appeared in Poets Corner.
Some of the most famous buried here, include the poets John Dryden, Tennyson, Robert Browning and John Masefield. Many writers, including William Camden, Dr. Samuel Johnson, Charles Dickens, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Hardy are also buried here.
Charles Dickens’ grave attracts particular interest. Today, more than 110 years later, a wreath is still laid on his tomb on the anniversary of his death each year.
Those who have memorials here, although they are buried elsewhere, include Shakespeare, John Milton, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Thomas Gray, Robert Burns, William Blake, T.S. Eliot and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Writers such as Samuel Butler, Jane Austen, Oliver Goldsmith, Sir Walter Scott, John Ruskin, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte, Henry James and Sir John Betjeman have also been given memorials here. Dylan Thomas and Lewis Carroll are among the most recent.
‘The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living’ Epitaph on the memorial to T.S.Eliot.
George Frederick Handel, is one of those who are not poets or writers, yet are buried in the South Transept. The musician and composer was born at Halle in Germany but settled in England in 1712. Among his famous works are the ‘Water Music’ and the ‘Music for the Royal Fireworks’, but it is Messiah for which he is best remembered. On his monument, carved by Roubillac, Handel is shown holding the score of the Messiah.
Lord Byron, 1788-1824, is probably best known for his poems Childe Harold and Don Juan. Born in London and educated at Harrow and Cambridge, he married Anne Milbanke in 1815, but the marriage was an unhappy and they separated, and Byron went to live abroad in order to escape the scandal which followed the separation.The Poetry Society gave the present white marble slab in 1969.
