London, England - Westminster Abbey Poets' Corner - August 2024

The last place in Westminster Abbey we visited, and most likely my favorite, was Poets' Corner. Poets' Corner is just off of the South Transept, It is where many poets, playwrights, and writers are buried or commemorated. The first poet interred in Poets' Corner was Geoffrey Chaucer in 1400.

In my humble opinion, it's also got some flagrant misogyny happening. This first photo below is a pretty good case-in-point; William Shakespeare has a giant statue and shelf, Samuel Johnson (who is validly famous for writing a dictionary, but there's not a lot of storytelling there) has a well-lit bust and arch... and Jane Austen has a tiny plaque in the shadows underneath a dude who she has far outshone in her career. You can't even argue that it's because she wasn't buried in Westminster, because neither were Shakespeare nor Johnson. She just had the misfortune of being a female.

That's some first-class bullcrap right there. It's not possible to make a bigger deal out of Shakespeare. Jane is reputed to have sold well over 100 million books, putting her up among the best-selling authors of all time; no Johnson is even within spitting distance. In fact, his dictionary was pretty immediately revamped.

In case you didn't know this is William Shakespeare, there are three different places where his name is pronounced in this one photo.

A thought that the Shelley mentioned here was Mary Shelley, but it was actually Percy Bysshe. Mary was a badass who helped invent the modern monster story and is not in Poets' Corner, but sure, let's hang a laurel for her cheating degenerate of a husband whose first wife drowned herself in the Serpentine after he openly cheated on her with and impregnated Mary.

This is Handel's actual gravestone; he is one of many luminaries buried in Poets' Corner.

Similarly, Dickens and Kipling are interred here, as is Thomas Hardy in the harder-to-see beige stone in the lower right.

Sir Laurence Olivier is the second most-recent individual buried in Westminster Abbey; only Stephen Hawking is more recent.

Lewis Carroll, DH Lawrence, Lord Byron, and Dylan Thomas are among the stone shown here; none are actually interred in Westminster, however.

Robert Browning is buried here, although his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning is not.

Alfred Lord Tennyson is a favorite; he is actually buried here, as well.

This is the view from right outside of Westminster Abbey. There's a large traffic circle just below where the photo cuts off. The London Eye and Westminster Palace's Big Ben are obviously the main draws!

A and I got what were easily some of the worst hot dogs of our lives and ate them in this area by a fountain, just watching Big Ben and the people.

As you may have been able to tell by me posting three separate posts about it, Westminster Abbey was a great stop and I'd 100% go back. A didn't enjoy it quite as much as I did, so I'd probably want to go either by myself or with someone more into churches.