Poet's Corner

Chaucerian Figures

Where is Chaucer buried? Geoffrey Chaucer, the writer of one of medieval England's best-known works, died on this date in 1400. His Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories that tell of human foibles and idiosyncrasies, told by a gathering of pilgrims to pass the time as they journey from Southwark to Canterbury. The tales are mostly written in verse, each in the literary style of the particular storyteller. Chaucer used the services of a scrivener named Adam Pinkhurst to do the actual writing of the book, which was written in Middle English. When Chaucer died, he was interred in Westminster Abbey; he was the first to be buried in the section called the Poet's Corner. Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling are among the other writers whose final resting place is in the Poet's Corner.