In the south transept of Westminster Abbey, touched by the jeweled light of a rose window, is Poets’ Corner. Geoffrey Chaucer was buried here in 1400 — not because he wrote The Canterbury Tales, but because he was a royal official. Two centuries later, the great Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser asked to be interred next to the father of English literature, and so began the tradition.
Forty famous writers lie beneath the worn flagstones, and another 70 are commemorated in marble, bronze, and slate. Here is Shakespeare — or at least the face we think of as Shakespeare’s. Nearby is Ben Johnson, lost in thought. Jane Austen characteristically contents herself with a modest little tablet. Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling, C.S. Lewis and P.G. Wodehouse are all raised, carved, or etched in this sacred space. I work nearby and, when the tourist season is over, I often linger in that soft light. Here, of all places, you feel the force of the words that adorn T.S. Eliot’s memorial: “The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”
