Jonson, English writer, buried standing up

1637 Ben Jonson (b. 1572), 65, British comic genius and satirist, died in London. Like some other great poets and writers – including Dryden, Tennyson, Browning, Masefield, Dr Johnson, Dickens, Sheridan, Kipling and Hardy – he was honoured by being buried (in Ben's case, standing up) in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner, with the epitaph: “O rare Ben Jonson”.

Poets’ Corner 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 ...

Buried standing up
Ben Jonson reposes in an upright position (standing on his feet). One of the explanations given for this is that, dying in great poverty, Jonson begged King Charles I for “18 inches of square ground in Westminster Abbey”. Another says that one day the Dean of Westminster spoke to him about being buried in Poets’ Corner, and Jonson is said to have told him: “six feet long by two feet wide is too much for me. Two feet by two is all I want” ...